Things are hotting up (well cooling down really, but you get my drift) at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. The world's largest particle reactor is due to be go online on Sept 10, just 3 days from now.

Actually the switch-on started months ago as the eight sectors in the 27km ring have been progressively brought down to the -271 degC required for the superconducting magnets to work. But the big event this week, all being well, will be the first circulation of accelarated particles.

The first beam will be accelerated to an energy of 450 GeV (0.45 TeV), the preliminary step on the path to attaining particle energies of the record-breaking 5 TeV.

At full throttle, the LHC will accelerate particles to relativistic velocities, accessing energies previously unimaginable. Once the LHC reaches its optimum design specification (expected by 2010), it will generate beams seven-times more energetic and 30-times more intense than any other particle accelerator on the planet.

This is when things start to get interesting, and fears of the accidental creation of black holes big enough to absorb Switzerland have been voiced although the exhaustive safety studies that have been done have dismissed this possibility. And of course Swiss law explicitly forbids black holes from entering Switzerland. (OK, I made that bit up.)

As in an earlier blog in this series, I mentioned that one of the big results expected from this gigantic tool is to re-create the conditions that are thought to have existed just after the 'Big Bang' - or as Christians believe, the moment when God created the universe - to establish whether the so-called 'Higgs bosun' (which is thought to give mass to all particles) really exists.

If it cannot be found then the so-called Standard Model of fundamental particles will have to re-thought, although it will likely be 2010 before this will be known.

Scientists hope the LHC will also help in the understanding of the operation of gravity, the possible existence of extra dimensions and the nature of the 95 per cent of the universe that is invisible to our telescopes.

As those of us who love fundamental paricles learn more about the wonderful universe in which we find ourselves, we find ourselves drawn even more to worship the One who devised it all - our Creator God.