Mal Fletcher comments

Mal Fletcher

'Unlocking the secrets to life in our universe?' Well, perhaps not...

There's no doubt that the Large Hadron Collider, which runs for 27kms (17 miles) near the French/Swiss border and was fired up earlier this week, is a hugely impressive piece of machinery.

I suppose it ought to be having cost £3 billion. Physicists believe that this will eventually prove a wise investment. They're expecting all kinds of useful discoveries to emerge over the next months and years.

The Collider's ultimate task is to recreate the conditions that followed the first one billionth of a second after the Big Bang, which scientists believe kicked off the universe.

The whole thing works, apparently, by firing subatomic particles round a one-yard-wide metal tube, squeezing them into beams that are thinner than a human hair. The beams are fired in opposite directions.

Over the next few months, these beams will be made to collide, smashing into each other up to 600 million times per second.

Just being able to get a stream of subatomic photons to move, with anything like this precision, at near the speed of light, around a monster underground tube, is surely a major feat of ingenuity in itself.

I for one am definitely impressed by the scale of this 'machine'.

However, to say that all this will answer the most profound questions of life, as some commentators are claiming, is ridiculous.

Now, I consider myself a pretty forward-looking person on the whole - I definitely spend a good deal more time studying likely future trends than most people; it's part of my job.

Yet science, for all its impressive feats, will never answer the deepest questions that play on our minds, because those questions are not about the 'how' of life in the universe - they're about the 'why'.

For all we know, the construction of the Collider may lead to discoveries that will stand conventional scientific wisdom on its head, perhaps even impacting how human beings see their place within the cosmos.

It's happened before in history: as when human beings discovered that the earth orbits the sun, and not vice versa.

But even if this happens, even if physicists get the Collider to do amazing feats, science will still not be able to answer those most fundamental of all human quandaries: why am I here and what is my purpose?