Tuesday 12th October
HM Treasury, 1 Horse Guards Road, London, SW1A 2HQ
18.30-21.00

To mark the 50th anniversary of CERN’s foundation, you are invited to
a reception that will celebrate UK involvement in CERN’s past
successes and discuss future ambitions. In addition to world-leading
research that has won Nobel prizes; CERN was the birthplace of the World
Wide Web and has seen a host of other innovations that have led to
advances in information technology, electronics, detector materials and
instrumentation for healthcare.

CERN is the European Particle Physics Laboratory; a jewel in the crown
of European Scientific discovery and technology development. Its
large-scale experiments drive advancements across a range of
disciplines.

CERN’s future promises more developments in science and technology.
In 2007, CERN’s newest facility, Large Hadron Collider will commence
operations, searching for the elusive Higgs Boson – the particle thought
to give others mass, and answering compelling questions about dark
matter and dark energy, the existence of extra dimensions and the
fundamental nature of matter, energy, space and time.

Speakers:

Lord Sainsbury of Turville, Science Minister
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web (Video message)
Professor Ian Halliday, Chief Executive of Particle Physics and
Astronomy Research Council (PPARC)
Dr Robert Aymar, Director General, CERN

Notes to Editors

1. Media registration – to register for the event please contact Chris
Gosden at PPARC. Email Christy.gosden@pparc.ac.uk or Tel 01793 442009.
If you have already responded to a paper invitation, there is no need to
reply again.

2. For queries, please contact Julia Maddock in the PPARC Press Office,
contact details below.

3. The venue is HM Treasury, a map is available at
http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/contact/contact_index.cfm

Contacts

Julia Maddock
PPARC Press Office
Tel 01793 442094
Email Julia.maddock@pparc.ac.uk

CERN’s 50th Anniversary

PPARC funds UK involvement in CERN, the European Laboratory for
Particle Physics, which this year celebrates its 50th anniversary. The
convention that established its foundation was signed on 29 September
1954, marking, just 9 years after the end of the Second World War, an
early and pivotal event in the development of European co-operation,
with a political significance transcending its particular scientific
focus.
In the organisation’s golden jubilee year, CERN is focusing on the
Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which will be the world’s largest and most
complex scientific instrument when it switches on in 2007. Experiments
at the LHC will allow physicists to probe why the fundamental particles
have the masses they do as they search for the elusive Higgs Boson. LHC
experiments will also probe the mysterious missing mass and dark energy
of the universe – visible matter seems to account for just 5% of what
must exist. They will investigate the reason for nature’s preference for
matter over antimatter, and they will probe matter as it existed at the
very beginning of time.

CERN’s reputation is based on fundamental research, but the
organisation is also an important source of new technologies. This is
particularly true in the area of information technology. The World Wide
Web was invented at CERN, and today the organisation is in the vanguard
of the effort to develop a globally distributed computing system known
as the Grid. See http://www.pparc.ac.uk/cern/cn50_intro.asp for further
information.

PPARC

The Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) is the
UK’s strategic science investment agency. It funds research,
education and public understanding in four broad areas of science –
particle physics, astronomy, cosmology and space science.

PPARC is government funded and provides research grants and
studentships to scientists in British universities, gives researchers
access to world-class facilities and funds the UK membership of
international bodies such as the European Organisation for Nuclear
Research, CERN, the European Space Agency and the European Southern
Observatory. It also contributes money for the UK telescopes overseas on
La Palma, Hawaii, Australia and in Chile, the UK Astronomy Technology
Centre at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh and the MERLIN/VLBI National
Facility.