'Big Bang' machine ready for launch

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The £5 billion Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will smash protons - one of the building blocks of matter - into each other at energies up to seven times greater than any achieved before.

In the flashes from the collisions, scientists expect to reproduce conditions that existed during the first billionth of a second after the Big Bang at the birth of the universe.

No-one knows precisely what will come tumbling out of the primordial soup of disintegrating protons.

The LHC could help scientists explain mass, gravity, mysterious "dark matter" and why the universe looks the way it does.

It could also give them the first evidence of extra spatial dimensions, and even create mini-black holes that blink in and out of existence in a fraction of a second.

The LHC, a colossal machine housed in a 27 kilometre (17 mile) tunnel buried under 100 metres of rock, straddles the borders of Switzerland and France between Lake Geneva and the Jura mountains.

Beams of protons will be accelerated in opposite directions through the ring-shaped tunnel, which is supercooled to just 1.9 degrees above absolute zero (minus 271C), the lowest temperature allowed by nature.

Concerns have been voiced - in particular by German chemist Professor Otto Rossler - that black holes created by the LHC will grow uncontrollably and "eat the planet from the inside".

But those involved in the project insist they have reviewed all the evidence and concluded that it poses no risk to the universe.