Last updated at 01:18 04 May 2008

This huge tangle of wires and metal is the kind of machine scientists have been dreaming of for generations: one that will take them back 13billion years to the dawn of time and the Big Bang.

Known as the Atlas detector, it sits in the world's largest particle physics laboratory, where physicists plan to recreate the conditions that existed after the cataclysmic cosmic event they believe made our universe.

Atlas is about 150ft long, more than 75ft high and weighs about 7,000 tons.

Scroll down for more...

Awe-inspiring: Atlas is about 150ft long, more than 75ft high and weighs about 7,000 tons

It is about half as big as the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and weighs the same as the Eiffel Tower.

It's just part of a facility known as the Large Hadron Collider, which is a huge circular tube buried 300ft under the Swiss/French border in a tunnel 16.7 miles long - that's longer than London Underground's Circle line.

The scientists involved in the project - 1,800 of them from 160 universities in 34 countries - plan to fire two beams of protons (fragments of an atom) in opposite directions around the tunnel and make them collide head-on at nearly the speed of light.

The Atlas detector - really a giant ultra-sensitive camera - will be positioned at the point of impact to record what happens.

It is hoped the data collected will help scientists understand the fundamental nature of matter and the basic forces that shaped our universe . . . and could eventually determine its fate.