CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research , which sits astride the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, grew out of Europe's need for a positive and collaborative scientific effort following the destructive consequences of World War II.
Founded in 1954, its 60 th anniversary celebrations pay respect to these origins, proudly adorning each webpage on the CERN site with the phrase “Celebrating 60 years of science for peace.”
Guinness World Records is also celebrating its 60th anniversary book edition this year, and a team of officials headed to CERN to document and honour the organisation which has moved science so far forward in the last six decades.
The international team of scientists working at CERN are immensely proud of the peaceful purpose of their organisation, summed up perfectly by Article 2 of the CERN Convention, their founding charter:
“[it] shall have no concern with work for military requirements and the results of its experimental and theoretical work shall be published or otherwise made generally available.”
During these 60 years, experiments conducted at CERN have contributed an immeasurable amount to our understanding of the universe, earning some of the responsible scientists Nobel prizes for their contributions.
Gathering so many of the world’s sharpest minds in one organisation has fostered a prosperous culture of technological innovation – one notable result being the inception of the World Wide Web, conceived of by Sir Tim Berners-Lee as a means of disseminating data from experiments there.
All the while, the experiments at CERN have grown grander in scale and more technically complex in order to continue making ground-breaking discoveries. The culmination of this progression is a particle accelerator named, quite bluntly, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which broke the record for the Largest scientific instrumentupon completion in September 2008, at 27 km (17 mi) in circumference. Since then, the LHC has gone on to break numerous other records during its operation, a selection of which Guinness World Records was given the opportunity to present to the Director-General of CERN, Professor Rolf-Dieter Heuer, in the video above.
The crowning achievement of the LHC was its crucial part in finding the First proof of the existence of a Higgs bosonin March 2013. In order to find the evidence for this elusive particle, it was required to smash protons together at incredible energies, an endeavour which earned the LHC the record for the Most powerful particle accelerator. Along the way in 2012, scientists on the LHC were able to create the Highest man-made temperature, at an astounding 5 trillion K, a temperature not seen since moments after the Big Bang. 
It was hinted a number of times during GWR’s visit to CERN that we might see another record-breaking particle accelerator at the facility in 20 years’ time. Some may ask why they need another one so soon, but it stands to reason, as the LHC took a similar length of time to come to fruition.
The discovery of the Higgs boson raises a number of significant questions about how our universe works, and a larger particle accelerator may be just what’s needed to answer some of those questions. We hope the Guinness World Records certificates presented during this trip to Switzerland will be proudly displayed alongside the Nobel prizes as these scientists continue working toward those answers at CERN for the foreseeable future.
“It’s important that the Guinness World Records book continues to monitor these fundamental science superlatives,” said the book’s Editor-in-Chief Craig Glenday. “The fact that CERN was acknowledged in our very first edition 60 years ago and continues to break records in our latest edition is testament to the importance of this international scientific effort. It’s been a privilege to visit the Large Hadron Collider and present the team leaders’ their certificates, and I’m sure there will be plenty more record-breaking at CERN in its next 60 years.” 
British theoretical physicist and Nobel Prize laureate Peter Higgs (Reuters)
The 60th Anniversary Diamond Edition of the Guinness World Records book is out now! Find out all about it and see record holders like the longest tongue at www.guinnessworldrecords.com/2015
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