[1] The final version of the exhibition opened in January 2016,[2] developed by CERN in collaboration with Spanish design team Indissoluble.

The initial construction, to a large extent completed in 1989, was financed through contributions from the Canton of Geneva, the Swiss Confederation, neighbouring France, banks, and industrial firms.

[4][5] The exhibition displayed many real objects, taking visitors on a journey through CERN's key installations, from the hydrogen bottle, source of the protons that are injected into the LHC, through the first step in the accelerator chain, the linac, on to a model of a section of the Large Hadron Collider including elements from the superconducting magnets.

The annex to the exhibition contained other historical artifacts such as the central tracker from the UA1 detector, which ran at the Super Proton Synchrotron at CERN from 1981 to 1984, and helped discover the W and Z bosons.

[7] The Microcosm garden is named Léon Van Hove Square in honour of CERN's Research Director-General from 1976 to 1980.