In 1990, shortly before a CERN physicist subverted gender and science stereotypes by adapting Alice in Wonderland as an allegory in quantum mechanics, a different type of delightful subversion was afoot at the famed European Organization for Nuclear Research, now home to the Large Hadron Collider: Michele Muller, a former British model and actor working as a 3D graphic designer for a virtual reality project at CERN, was dating CERN computer scientist Silvano de Gennaro and found herself frustrated with her boyfriend’s seemingly unending shifts. Rather than fight over it, the two decided to have some fun with the relationship sticking point — Michele set her frustrations to song, asking Silvano to write some music that she would perform at the CERN Hardronic Festival. The song “Collider” was born — a humorous homage to the lonely nights and perpetual perils of a scientist’s lover that went a little something like, “I gave you a golden ring to show you my love / You went to stick it in a printed circuit / To fix a voltage leak in your collector / You plug my feelings into your detector.” The song was a hit, which led Muller to recruit a couple of her girlfriends and form Les Horribles Cernettes — a parody doo-wop band that dubbed itself “the one and only High Energy Rock Band” and sang love songs about colliders, quarks, liquid nitrogen, microwaves, and antimatter in ’60s-inspired outfits.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, founding father of the World Wide Web, was working at CERN at the time and had taken a liking to Les Horribles Cernettes’ irreverent odes to science. According to De Genarro, Berners-Lee asked him for a few scanned photos of the band to put on “some sort of information system he had just invented, called the ‘World Wide Web.’”

On July 18, 1992, this photograph of the band — comprised, at that point, of Michele Muller, Colette Marx-Nielsen, Angela Higney, and Lynn Veronneau — became the very first image uploaded to the web.

Not to take anything away from these girls, but everybody knows that my song: Higgs Boson -The Song is the best "cern inspired" song in existence.

Cool to see the first image EVER online though...