page_title: CERN
section_title: In popular culture
hierarchical_section_title: CERN / In popular culture
caption_attribution_description: English: Nataraja at CERN
context_page_description: The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, is a European research organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, the organization is based in a northwest suburb of Geneva on the Franco–Swiss border and has 23 member states. Israel is the only non-European country granted full membership. CERN is an official United Nations Observer.
  The acronym CERN is also used to refer to the laboratory, which in 2016 had 2,500 scientific, technical, and administrative staff members, and hosted about 12,000 users. In the same year, CERN generated 49 petabytes of data.
  CERN's main function is to provide the particle accelerators and other infrastructure needed for high-energy physics research – as a result, numerous experiments have been constructed at CERN through international collaborations. The main site at Meyrin hosts a large computing facility, which is primarily used to store and analyse data from experiments, as well as simulate events. Researchers need remote access to these facilities, so the lab has historically been a major wide area network hub. CERN is also the birthplace of the World Wide Web.
context_section_description: The band Les Horribles Cernettes was founded by women from CERN. The name was chosen so to have the same initials as the LHC.
  CERN's Large Hadron Collider is the subject of a (scientifically accurate) rap video starring Katherine McAlpine with some of the facility's staff.
  Particle Fever, a 2013 documentary, explores CERN throughout the inside and depicts the events surrounding the 2012 discovery of the Higgs Boson
  CERN is depicted in an episode of South Park (Season 13, Episode 6) called "Pinewood Derby". Randy Marsh, the father of one of the main characters, breaks into the "Hadron Particle Super Collider in Switzerland" and steals a "superconducting bending magnet created for use in tests with particle acceleration" to use in his son Stan's Pinewood Derby racer. Randy breaks into CERN dressed in disguise as Princess Leia from the Star Wars saga. The break-in is captured on surveillance tape which is then broadcast on the news.
  John Titor, a self-proclaimed time traveler, alleged that CERN would invent time travel in 2001.
  CERN is depicted in the visual novel/anime series Steins;Gate as SERN, a shadowy organization that has been researching time travel in order to restructure and control the world.
  In Dan Brown's mystery-thriller novel Angels & Demons and film of the same name, a canister of antimatter is stolen from CERN.
  In the popular children's series The 39 Clues, CERN is said to be an Ekaterina stronghold hiding the clue hydrogen.
  In Robert J. Sawyer's science fiction novel Flashforward, at CERN, the Large Hadron Collider accelerator is performing a run to search for the Higgs boson when the entire human race sees themselves twenty-one years and six months in the future.
  In season 3 episode 15 of the TV sitcom The Big Bang Theory titled "The Large Hadron Collision", Leonard and Raj travel to CERN to attend a conference and see the LHC.
  The 2012 student film Decay, which centers on the idea of the Large Hadron Collider transforming people into zombies, was filmed on location in CERN's maintenance tunnels.
  The Compact Muon Solenoid at CERN was used as the basis for the Megadeth's Super Collider album cover.
  In Super Lovers, Haruko (Ren's mother) worked at CERN, and Ren was taught by CERN professors
  CERN forms part of the back story of the massively multiplayer augmented reality game Ingress.
  CERN forms also part of the story of the Japanese anime television series Ingress: The Animation in 2019, based on Niantic's augmented reality mobile game of the same name.
  In season 10 episode 6 of the BBC TV show Doctor Who titled "Extremis", CERN and its physicists are involved in a mysterious plot involving a book that causes everyone who reads it to kill themselves.
  In 2015, Sarah Charley, US communications manager for LHC experiments at CERN with graduate students Jesse Heilman of the University of California, Riverside, and Tom Perry and Laser Seymour Kaplan of the University of Wisconsin, Madison created a parody video of “Collide” a song by American artist Howie Day. The lyrics were changed to be from the perspective of a proton in the Large Hadron Collider. After seeing the parody, Day re-recorded the song with the new lyrics and in February, 2017 Day released this new version of "Collide" in a video created during his visit to CERN.
caption: The statue of Shiva engaging in the Nataraja dance presented by the Department of Atomic Energy of India.
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