It CERNtainly all comes full circle...

I CERNtainly find it all a bit interesting. You may have heard of the world's largest hadron particle physics laboratory or what is known in laymen terms as "The Big Collider". CERN Laboratories was founded in 1954. It was the first European collaboration of scientists from numerous countries. It is now a global scientific experiment, located on the borders or Switzerland and France, that has opened their experimental processes recently.

The instruments used at CERN are particle accelerators and detectors. Accelerators boost beams of particles to high energies before they are made to collide with each other or with stationary targets. Detectors observe and record the results of these collisions. By studying what happens when these particles collide, physicists learn about the laws of Nature.

They sent a particle beam through the system to test it, about a month ago. Due to a few glitches then needed to shut down in order to fix a few magnetic switch issues. They will restart again soon. It simply takes a long time for the 27km tunnel that traverses underground through both countries to warm up to a room temperature for people to be enter it and fix the necessary problems, to then be re-cooled to a temperature of -271C or 1.9Kelvin. This is the temperature that helium becomes superfluid. This simply means that the gas flows with virtually no viscosity which allows for greater heat transfer for the hadron particles to fly at nearly the speed of light. The particle beam is shot through the circular tunnel and floats through the helium effortlessly to finally reach a destination of collision with another particle or solid surface.

What may not be known to many about the CERN organization is that the Internet was invented here. Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN, invented the World Wide Web in 1990. This is where the www comes from in any internet address. The Web, as it is affectionately called, was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automatic information sharing between scientists working in different universities and institutes all over the world. It made it easy and quite cost effective (basically free) for scientist throught the world to send information to eachother. CERN is not an isolated laboratory, but rather a focus for an extensive community that now includes about 60 countries and thousands of scientists. Although these scientists typically spend some time on the CERN site, they usually work at universities and national laboratories in their home countries. Good contact is clearly essential.

The basic idea of the WWW was to merge the technologies of personal computers, computer networking and hypertext into a powerful and easy to use global information system. The first proposal for the World Wide Web was made at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, and further refined by him and Robert Cailliau in 1990.

By the end of that year, prototype software for a basic system (BASIC) was already being demonstrated. To encourage its adoption, CERN developed a 'help service' and the now familiar Usenet newsgroups were provided. CERN provided a simple browser, which could be run on any system.

In 1991, an early WWW system was released to the high energy physics community via the CERN program library. It included the simple browser, web server software and a library, implementing the essential functions for developers to build their own software. This is known as open sourced software. A wide range of universities and research laboratories started to use it. A little later it was made generally available via the Internet, especially to the community of people working on hypertext systems. Hypertext, or the http of any internet address, is the computer language which overcomes the use of simple text. This is where multiple links and connections are established and other applications and video may be run on it.

The first web server in the United States came on-line in December 1991, once again in a pure research institute: the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California. At this stage, there were essentially only two kinds of browser. One was the original development version, very sophisticated. The other was the ‘line-mode’ browser, which was easy to install and run on any platform but limited in power and user-friendliness. It was clear that the small team at CERN could not do all the work needed to develop the system further, so Berners-Lee launched a plea via the Internet for other developers to join in.

Early in 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois released a first version of their Mosaic browser, developed by the now famous Marc Andreessen. This was the precursor of the Netscape browser.

By the end of 1994, the Web had 10,000 servers, of which 2,000 were commercial, and 10 million users. Traffic was equivalent to shipping the entire collected works of Shakespeare every second. The technology was continually extended to cater for new needs. Security and tools for e-commerce were the most important features soon to be added.

An essential point was that the Web should remain an open standard for all to use and that no-one should lock it up into a proprietary system. In this spirit, CERN submitted a proposal to the Commission of the European Union under the ESPRIT programme: ‘WebCore’. The goal of the project was an International Consortium, in collaboration with the US Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Berners-Lee officially left CERN at the end of 1994 to work on the Consortium from the MIT base. But with approval of the LHC project clearly in sight, it was decided that further Web development was an activity beyond the Laboratory’s primary mission. A new home for basic Web work was needed.

In January 1995, the International World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded ‘to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its interoperability’.

By 2007 W3C, run jointly by MIT/LCS in the US, INRIA in France, and Keio University in Japan, had more than 430 member organizations from around the world.

Okay...why I went through this is to show the collaborative efforts that science has taken us to share knowledge and information...FREE!

I will be following this up tomorrow with PART TWO of my study of CERN, Marc Andreessen and their true effects on our global society.



(c)Copyright 2008 Doug Boggs