Big science. That’s what Horizon used to do best. And that’s what it almost managed to get back to tonight. That is to say, the program was definitely about big science, but for today’s audience – who the producers clearly think have brains not much larger than a gnat’s and attention spans to match – the story has to be wrapped up in CGI, preceded by almost thirty minutes of irrelevant waffle about the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (worth a program on its own, incidentally, but with only a passing connection to the eponymous experiment) and take care to avoid explicit mention of the Higgs Boson.

Buried on average 100m deep (it varies between 50-175m) beneath a field outside Geneva, the Large Hadron Collider is due to be switched on on 26 November this year. What  will it do? I’m tempted to say it will collide large hadrons, but even I can’t be glib in the face of such an awesome project. Six billion dollars (that’s three billion of your English pounds) and over ten years in construction, this project will attempt to recreate the conditions that existed one billionth of a second after the Big Bang by firing two beams of super-energised protons at each other, head on.

The resulting explosion will create a black hole and swallow up the entire planet.

(Worst case scenario – and included in tonight’s programme purely for sensationalist dramatic effect).

If things go according to plan there’ll be no black hole and no swallowing. Instead there’ll be a cascade of particles captured on cameras the size of cathedrals built along the walls of the collider and maybe, just maybe, some of those particles will be the elusive Higgs bosons – the final missing piece of the Standard Model of particle physics that explains why everything in the universe has mass.

Show me the maths and I’d be lost in an instant, but I could talk about this stuff until the cows come home. Utterly fascinating and compelling, and despite the annoying graphics representing the big bang, and the hadron (protons in this case, if you were wondering) collisions, and the paths of the particles, that were run and rerun ad nauseam, there was just about enough real science in this to satisfy. And it was big. Really big. 27km in diameter, and delivering protons energised to 7 TeV when full commissioning is completed. That’s big. Trust me. Or even better, trust the people who wrote all this:

Large Hadron Collider at Wikipedia
LHC Homepage at CERN
What is a Hadron? (the answer just throws up a bunch more questions. Make a cup of tea before reading)
Description of LHC for public consumption (also explains what a TeV is for the layman)