You know when people ask you if you could do any job what would it be? Well embarrassingly enough, my answer is to work at CERN, in Switzerland, that’s the European Organization for Nuclear Research. No, not weapons: it’s where they do these cool experiments on particles and basically try to figure out what happens when they are accelerated to speeds approaching that of the speed of light.

It’s something we did in college, all too briefly, in quantum mechanics lectures and it really captured my imagination. Is it possible to understand what happened just after the “big bang” by trying to recreate the conditions and then sitting back and watching it unfold? I for one would like to think that that would unlock at least some of the questions we have, as yet, been unable to answer fully.

On Sept 10th CERN will try just that by using their new Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which is a 27km underground facility. This machine will be able to create beams which will be 7 times more powerful than that created so far and this will help in the recreation. The tunnel will have to be cooled to the temperature of outer space for this experiment to start and that alone is some going.

This will hopefully explain why there is more matter than anti matter and may even explain how particles acquire their mass. It’s all very exciting and may well lead to a new frontier of physics itself.