It's the stuff that science fiction is made of, one of the most ambitious science projects of all time, and is possibly also the most expensive. However, with this experiment, scientists may just finally achieve the Holy Grail of physics: The God particle.

At the Cern particle physics lab in Switzerland, more than 600 physicists are working on the Large Hadron Collider, a machine that they hope will finally reveal details on how the universe began. The Collider will be large enough to house the nave of Westminster Abbey and will be monitored by computers that were built to easily handle information and data that is the equivalent of 150 times of what's on the internet each year.

As side-effects of the machine, "dark energy" which is believed to drive the expansion of the universe, may be revealed. On top of this, as some scientists think that the universe is composed of various dimensions, the machine may momentarily create wedges to other dimensions from which enormous amounts of gravity can seep through. This influx of gravity may then result in the creation of baby black holes.

And all this just so they could hunt down the so-called God particle which is properly known as the Higgs boson particle, which is supposed to make other particles heavier by clinging to them, thus later on resulting into mass, and in turn answering the question of why objects have mass in the first place. "It's probably the closest to God that we'll get," says Cern's chief scientist, Jos Engelen.