Professor Brian Cox visits Geneva to take a look around Cern's Large Hadron Collider before this vast, 27km long machine is sealed off and a simulation experiment begins to try and create the conditions that existed just a billionth of a second after the Big Bang.

Cox joins the scientists who hope that the LHC will change our understanding of the early universe and solve some of its mysteries.

News: Not to be thwarted by a few annoying speed bumps on the road to discovery, CERN scientists have successfully slammed accelerated protons together inside the giant Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in order to re-create conditions within the universe just moments after the Big Bang.

With two streams of particles travelling at close to the speed of light and moving around the giant ring-shaped accelerator in opposite directions, attending scientists at the CERN facility just outside Geneva created the very first collision at a little after 1100 GMT – causing widespread celebration amongst those who witnessed it.

"This opens the door to a totally new era of discovery,” enthused CERN's director of research Sergio Bertolucci via a video relay from the LHC facility. “It is a step into the unknown where we will find things we thought were there and perhaps things we didn't know existed."