Will the Large Hadron Collider finally reveal the elusive God particle?

In the coming months the most complex scientific instrument ever built will be switched on. The Large Hadron Collider promises to recreate the conditions right after the Big Bang. By revisiting the beginning of time, scientists hope to unravel some of the deepest secrets of our Universe.

Within these first few moments the building blocks of the Universe were created. The search for these fundamental particles has occupied scientists for decades but there remains one particle that has stubbornly refused to appear in any experiment. The Higgs Boson is so crucial to our understanding of the Universe that it has been dubbed the God particle. It explains how fundamental particles acquire mass, or as one scientist plainly states: "It is what makes stuff stuff..."

Dr Brian Cox wants to know why the Universe is built the way it is.

Particle physicist and ex D:Ream keyboard player Dr Brian Cox wants to know why the Universe is built the way it is. He believes the answers lie in the force of gravity. But Newton thought gravity was powered by God, and even Einstein failed to completely solve it. Heading out with his film crew on a road trip across the USA, Brian fires lasers at the moon in Texas, goes mad in the desert in Arizona, encounters the bending of space and time at a maximum security military base, tries to detect ripples in our reality in the swamps of Louisiana and searches for hidden dimensions just outside Chicago.

Particle physicist Professor Brian Cox asks, 'What time is it?' It's a simple question and it sounds like it has a simple answer. But do we really know what it is that we're asking?

Brian visits the ancient Mayan pyramids in Mexico where the Maya built temples to time. He finds out that a day is never 24 hours and meets Earth's very own Director of Time. He journeys to the beginning of time, and goes beyond within the realms of string theory, and explores the very limit of time. He discovers that we not only travel through time at the speed of light, but the experience we feel as the passing of time could be an illusion.

Professor Brian Cox takes a look through nearly 50 years of BBC archive at the story of man's relationship with the Moon.