Think about all the stuff people have made – all of it – throughout all the history of forever.
Every single tool, every item of clothing, every building, every machine, every work of art, every song and musical instrument, every single book or research study or scientific discovery. What would you say is the best out of all of everything that anyone has ever made?
I got a degree in one small slice of that vast range of production: Western Art History. I learned from my studies that throughout time, artists had tried and tried and tried some more to imitate nature, to pay homage to it, to do it justice, to show their appreciation for it by capturing it any way they could, in paint or stone or bronze. With the invention of cameras and computers, they tried that too.
But no artist, however skilled they may be – no person is going to make anything even half as amazing as a sunset, a duckling or a spring blossom. Simply, in the contest between what nature creates and what people create, nature wins.
But the question interests me anyway: what is the best thing that humanity has ever produced? Humans have made some incredible things after all. Consider the terra cotta warriors, the Taj Mahal, the Mayan and Egyptian pyramids and Stone Henge, to say nothing of modern marvels like rocket ships and cellphones. All amazing, but none of them are the best – at least not to me.
I reserve that designation for this:
Behind me is the Synchrocyclotron, the first particle accelerator built at CERN. The original 12 Member States (all in Western Europe) agreed on the design, and by 1954, construction of the machine began with parts coming from countries across Europe.
It was operational by 1957. Even then, it wasn’t the biggest accelerator, but it was the only one jointly owned by the founding members. Nowadays, the Synchrocyclotron is a museum piece, which is why I was able to take a selfie with it when I visited in 2016 and took a tour.
To this day, CERN is home to the largest and most sophisticated particle collider on Earth — and the research facility is still jointly owned by a consortium of nations that cooperate in the pursuit of the furthest horizons of scientific discovery, without either a military motive or a profit motive. The research facility is always in demand, and of course, this has led to a lot of publishing.
So it’s not surprising that the researches there needed a better information management system. So they came up with a good one, so good in fact that our internet browsers have their ancestry in the referencing system developed at CERN. This just makes me love it even more.
So as I see it, CERN is the best thing that people have ever made, ever, throughout all the history of humans making things. I know of nothing else like it, and the fact of its existence makes me feel proud and happy to be alive.