HISTORY
The convention establishing CERN[13] was ratified on 29 September 1954 by 12 countries in Western Europe.[14] The acronym CERN originally represented the French words for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire ('European Council for Nuclear Research'), which was a provisional council for building the laboratory, established by 12 European governments in 1952. During these early years, the council worked at the University of Copenhagen under the direction of Niels Bohr before moving to its present site in Geneva. The acronym was retained for the new laboratory after the provisional council was dissolved, even though the name changed to the current Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire ('European Organization for Nuclear Research') in 1954.[15][16] According to Lew Kowarski, a former director of CERN, when the name was changed, the abbreviation could have become the awkward OERN,[17] and Werner Heisenberg said that this could "still be CERN even if the name is [not]".[18]
CERN's first president was Sir Benjamin Lockspeiser. Edoardo Amaldi was the general secretary of CERN at its early stages when operations were still provisional, while the first Director-General (1954) was Felix Bloch.[19]
The laboratory was originally devoted to the study of atomic nuclei, but was soon applied to higher-energy physics, concerned mainly with the study of interactions between subatomic particles. Therefore, the laboratory operated by CERN is commonly referred to as the European laboratory for particle physics (Laboratoire européen pour la physique des particules), which better describes the research being performed there