Beam Me Up Scottie

It has been an extraordinary experience to be shown the innermost workings of the most amazing machine Mankind has ever built.

We were treated to first-hand accounts from many of the physicists and analysts who worked at CERN while the hunt for the Higgs was on. From the cryogenics workshops to the ATLAS control room (above), the main LHC control room to 100 m underground, in the enormous CMS detector itself.

From the sheer size of the machines to both extremes of temperature and data collection, we began to get an understanding of just what an incredible place this is. The very fabric of the universe at the subatomic level is torn apart and yet more weird and bizarre particles are revealed.

Now that the Higgs is old news, what next for the boffins at CERN? Well, they have already discovered that anti-hydrogen does not fall upwards after all, so anti-gravity may have to remain the prerogative of the Star Trek universe a while longer. And so the search for sparticles and super-symmetry seems to be next to take centre stage.

But not until after an 18 month refit when the LHC will become twice as powerful as it is now.

I shall wait with baited breath to see if they don't just rip the space-time continuum in half and we all disappear up our own large colliders!