Bill Bryson, author of “Notes from a Small Island,” was at CERN last week. Excerpted below is the opening of an article he wrote about it for The Times of London

“…Turn your back on Geneva and head out past its western suburbs and into the pleasant but uneventful countryside beyond. There, in a broad valley shared with France, stands a collection of buildings that look like the leftovers from a 1960s Festival of Bad Design.

This is it. You have found it. This is CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research. Over the next few days the people who run the place will cautiously restart the immensely large machine (almost 27 kilometres around) known as the Large Hadron Collider and begin swooshing particles around it in a way that will, when it is fully humming, recreate conditions as they were in the Universe one millionth of a millionth of a second after the beginning of the big bang."

Imagine the moment before that moment, when there was no space, no time, no matter, nothing. It is not easy to conceive such a nothingness, but that is what there was. Then, in a moment of unimaginable majesty and abruptness, there came into being the spacious, mysterious void in which we float, and all the matter therein and much else besides. Everything there is — light, matter, the laws of physics — traces back to that moment of creation. Now, for the first time in 13½ billion years, the circumstances of that event can be replicated, but with the crucial difference that this time some of the smartest people on Earth can draw up chairs and watch. It is this that may soon make CERN the most exciting place on Earth, or possibly anywhere."

Particle physicists divine the secrets of the Universe in a startlingly straightforward way: by flinging particles together with violence and seeing what flies off. The process has been likened to firing two Swiss watches into each other and deducing how they work by examining their debris. . . "

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