Scientists rejoiced last night when they managed to smash proton beams together for the first time in a £6bn giant machine designed to reveal clues about the origins of the universe.

Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern, the nuclear research organisation near Geneva, hope their experiments can recreate conditions moments after the big bang. The machine, which occupies an almost 17 mile-long tunnel 100 metres beneath the French-Swiss border, achieved the collisions by sending two groups of sub-atomic particles around in opposite directions at the same time.