The most advanced scientific instrument ever built has been switched on in Geneva. It was originally due to be turned on a couple of weeks ago but was put back, rumour has it, due to Andrew Marr being on holiday and the request that he cover the story for the BBC to maximize the media attention. The eyes of the world were on LHC project leader Dr Lyndon Evans, from Aberdare in south Wales, in the tense minutes before the machine was "switched on". Looking relaxed in a short-sleeved shirt and jeans, Dr Evans counted down the last few seconds before the first beam of protons was put into the LHC. "Five, four, three, two, one, zero - nothing," he joked before a blip appeared on a computer monitor signalling that the long years of hard work had paid off and the machine was working. Dr Evans, whose father was a coalminer, said: "This is really the biggest and most complex scientific project ever undertaken, and you cannot do a thing like this without engineers and applied scientists of very top quality." The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been built to test current theories for particle physics and scientists will try and recreate the conditions that existed just after the Big Bang by smashing parts of atoms together at high speeds. When activated the collider could show one of the most elusive particles in our Universe, the Higgs boson, also called the "God particle". This observation could confirm the Standard Model of physics unifying three of the four known fundamental forces: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force, leaving out just gravity. However, other more dangerous particles will also be produced for which searches are planned, such as black holes, and never seen before particles of matter, and even now, the architects of what is being termed a "Doomsday" machine, the U.S. Department of Energy, Fermilab, the National Science Foundation and CERN are being sued in federal court over fears that this experiment may in fact destroy the planet. Also our old friend Nostradamus’ words ring from the grave with this grim prediction: Nostradamus quatrain 9 44: Leave, leave Geneva every last one of you, Saturn will be converted from gold to iron, "Raypoz" will exterminate all who oppose him, Before the coming the sky will show signs. Did Nostradamus predict the Large Hadron Collider? Will the Earth disappear into a black hole of its own making? >>We need you to tell us before it's too late >>Did Nostradamus predict the coming of the Large Hadron Collider? >>What is the Large Hadron Collider >>Meet the doomsday machine