Why does CERN keep a name its own organization officially dropped?

CERN keeps an acronym that stopped matching its official name in 1954, simply because the old letters were kept when the name changed, and the alternative was awkward. The letters stood for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Council for Nuclear Research), a provisional council set up by 12 European governments in 1952 to build the laboratory. In its early years it worked at the University of Copenhagen under Niels Bohr, before moving near Geneva.

In 1954 the provisional council was dissolved and the organization's name became the Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire (European Organization for Nuclear Research). The acronym was retained anyway. According to Lew Kowarski, a former director of CERN, the new name could have given the awkward abbreviation 'OERN', and the physicist Werner Heisenberg said it could 'still be CERN even if the name is not.'

The lab behind those four letters became the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Its UA1 and UA2 experiments found the W and Z bosons in 1983, and in 2012 its experiments found a boson consistent with the long-sought Higgs boson. It runs the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider, and in 1989 Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web there to help researchers share information. Not every headline held up, though: in 2011, a reported detection of possibly faster-than-light neutrinos turned out to come from an incorrectly connected GPS synchronization cable.