CERN has lots of experiments underway, but the marquee projects are those associated with the LHC -- the largest particle accelerator in the world. It has a ring circumference of 27 kilometers.
Though the discovery of the Higgs Boson is one discovery that most people associate with CERN. Cooler, at least to me, is that CERN demonstrated the existence of antimatter by creating antihydrogen. Cooler to the world . . . CERN claims credit for creating the worldwide web. The first webpage is here.
Fermilab, in Batavia, Illinois and where Tote spent a couple years, was for many years the largest particle accelerator. The U.S. dropped funding for a Fermilab replacement, after spending $2 billion, which it had actually started to build in Texas. The Texas ring would have been twice as large as the LHC.
The official languages of CERN are English and French. On the official signs we saw, English had top billing.