In just five more days (10th September 2008), the most complex scientific instrument ever built will be switched on. The Large Hadron Collider promises to recreate the conditions right after the Big Bang.

By revisiting the beginning of time, scientists hope to unravel some of the deepest secrets of our Universe. Within these first few moments the building blocks of the Universe were created. The search for these fundamental particles has occupied scientists for decades but there remains one particle that has stubbornly refused to appear in any experiment. The Higgs Boson is so crucial to our understanding of the Universe that it has been dubbed the God particle. It explains how fundamental particles acquire mass, or as one scientist plainly states: “It is what makes stuff stuff…”