I admit to some trepidation when I noticed BBC Two were planning a series on the Cosmos. Since cosmology is one of my all-time favourite subjects and my views on the frequently dire quality of TV science are well documented, I had fairly low expectations. I needn’t have worried.

In the hands of Adam Hart-Davis, the subject is safe. This man is the perfect TV scientist, the latest in an illustrious line of learned men who are also great communicators; able to express and explain complex ideas in an understandable way without being patronising or dumbing it down to the level of pointless pap. And his main subject this week, the Large Hadron Collider, is one of the most sophisticated and significant experiments in human history.

Originally scheduled for its first (low energy) run later this year, the delays in construction have now resulted in a new schedule for the LHC and the abandoning of the idea of an initial run at low energy. The machine will now power up to full energy and begin experimentation in May 2008.

I’ve already discussed the LHC and provided several links to other material on the topic in my review of the Horizon programme on it in May. What made this version of the story more compelling was its simplicity and directness. Hart-Davis is not a particle physicist (he’s a chemist by training) but he’d clearly absorbed enough of the topic to talk sensibly about it and managed to convey the rudiments of the LHC without recourse to Horizon’s flashy graphics and what’s more, he wasn’t scared to mention the Higgs boson. He even drafted in an expert on the subject to explain it to us even more clearly.

This elusive particle is what causes mass (it is hypothesised – the particle has never been found). Without it, other elementary particles would all be whizzing around at or near the speed of light and would never travel slow enough to have mass. And if that were true, we wouldn’t be here to be debating it.

And that would be a pity because we wouldn’t be here to watch the rest of this fascinating series then either.

Next week we discover how far out into space and back into time we can see when Adam Hart-Davis visits the world’s largest telescope in Chile’s Atacama desert and Dr Maggie Aderin visits the strange telescope in Tuscany that will soon reveal the cosmos using gravity waves – predicted by Einstein, but until now too weak to detect.

Cosmos: A Beginner’s Guide: BBC Two, Tuesdays at 7.30pm for another four weeks