The Large Hadron Collider at the Geneva laboratories of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN – the derivation of the acronym is as complicated as the experiments it conducts) is the most complex scientific apparatus ever built. Its magnets have enough superconducting wire to stretch to the Sun and back five times, it can produce a vacuum ten times greater than on the Moon’s surface, and this week the Beeb is flinging about as much airtime at it as it threw at the Olympics. This all means that lovers of unintelligible science broadcasting, – and aren’t we all? – are in for a treat.

Next Wednesday the LHC will be switched on and particle physicists will begin to try to replicate what happened at the precise moment of the Big Bang. But the actual event will be only the pinnacle of a week of programming in which proper scientists will be trying to explain what will happen in populist terms, and a whole load of people you would never think of as being into that sort of stuff will wax enthusiastic.

All week, for example, the mathematician Simon Singh will be telling the stories of Five Particles (Mon-Fri, Radio 4, 3.45pm), from electrons to the “sparticle”. The same day Quentin Cooper will explore The Making of CERN (Radio 4, 9pm). Then on Wednesday Adam Hart-Davis will present the history of the Large Hadron Collider itself in Engineering Solutions (Radio 4, 9.45am) before (at 11am) the physicist and former member of the hit-making group DReam (true, apparently) Brian Cox will be giving the comedian Ben Miller (who also presents a three-part series, The Great Big Particle Adventure, beginning at 9pm) a tour of CERN itself.

Miller also gets the views of the Hollywood actor and particle physics nut Alda Alda, while John Barrowman, the star of BBC TV’s Torchwood, expresses his amazement at it all before appearing in a special radio episode of Torchwood itself ( Afternoon Play, Radio 4, 2.15pm) set at CERN and probably featuring aliens. On Wednesday, too, Steve Punt takes a hilarious sidelong view of it all in his comedy The Genuine Particle (Radio 4, 11.30pm).

Set against all this the actual events of Big Bang Day rather pale into subatomic insignificance.

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