It has been called a 'Big Bang Machine', but what is the Large Hadron Collider and what do scientists hope it will discover? Presented by Robert Llewellyn, the three video tracks in this album address the science of collisions, the purpose of particle acceleration and the construction of the LHC at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, in Geneva. This cutting edge machine may detect the elusive Higgs boson, and with it reveal the origin of mass, the missing piece in our understanding of matter. If it succeeds, it will begin the next era of research into the nature of the universe. This material forms part of The Open University course S207 The physical world.