If you’re able to read this magazine on Saturday in an unchanged world, it’s probably safe to assume that Wednesday’s gigantic experiment with particle physics has not brought about the catastrophe that some doomsayers have predicted. Big Bang Day was the moment when the scientists at the great Cern laboratory under the Alps finally switched on the Large Hadron Collider which they have been designing for the last 20 or more years in an attempt to replicate the moment when the universe was created. Billions of particles will be accelerated round a tunnel 27 kilometres in diameter at the speed (almost) of light; what happens when they collide will be detected and recorded. I tell you all this with pride, having at last got some idea of what Cern is all about — thanks to Radio Four, which on Wednesday was given over to science for the day in an extraordinary piece of co-ordinated programming. During the week we also had Quentin Cooper investigating The Making of Cern while Adam Hart-Davis talked us through the Engineering Solutions that might emerge from this enormous experiment.
Science has been brought out of the closet and been made fashionable again (the arts and sciences are like recession, boomeranging in and out of favour; those of us with long enough memories remember when it was cool to work in science and technology, and to study history, as I did, was regarded by some with contempt). Even Andrew Marr was tempted out of his helicopter to go deep underground into the cavernous laboratories of the Cern institute, close to Geneva on the borders between Switzerland and France, to find out just exactly what was going to happen when the giant particle accelerator was finally switched on and the particles were released on their epic journey through the accelerator.
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