A never before seen experiment is to be made this Wednesday. Scientist are preparing themselves to take part at the beginnings of the Universe and maybe find some answers to the most ambiguous problems of physics with the powering up of the largest particle accelerator ever built. The machine at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, promises scientists a closer look at the makeup of matter.

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a 17-mile long underground tunnel near Geneva that houses the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. Scientists worldwide have waited for this moment for two decades. The machine will smash protons - one of the building blocks of matter - into each other at energies up to seven times greater than any achieved before. The flashes from the collision and the conditions that existed during the first billionth of a second after the Big Bang are expected to be reproduced. Scientists believe microscopic black holes might be generated in the machine. But we needn’t worry that the Earth might just vanish and turn into a black hole itself, because these black holes will blink in and out of existence before anything unpleasant happens.

CERN's machine has been under construction since 2003, financed mostly by its 20 European member states. The United States and Japan are major contributors with observer status in CERN. Researchers of 80 nationalities took part in the project 1,200 of whom are from the U.S.A.

Recreating the Big Bang is indeed a unique moment. Researchers of life and how it occurred on our planet believe that that explosion of an object the size of a small coin occurred about 13.7 billion years ago and led to formation of stars and planets.

During the first tests however, a particle beam will be shot all the way around the LHC channel in just one direction. If all goes well, collisions might be tried within the coming weeks, but at low intensity, so that unordinary explosions do not occur. But it will take months for the machine to reach full power.

"We know that the way elementary particles interacted with each other controlled the very early universe," said John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at CERN. "So with the LHC we are able to, in some sense, re-create the conditions that existed in the universe when it was just a fraction of a second old, the sort of thing that the optical telescopes just can't see."

Only one elementary particle predicted by the Standard Model has not yet been detected: the Higgs boson, which is thought to interact with other particles to give them mass. Scientists really believe in its existence and hope not only to be sure of its actual existence but also hope to find additional space dimensions. Scientists say there’s nothing to worry about, as the safety of the project, 20 years in the making, has been thoroughly considered.