I’m terrible at waking up — I hate it. If I can get away with it, I get up at 9 o’clock. I stay in a little Holiday Inn close to Cern at the foothills of the Jura mountains in France. They knock on the door with breakfast, so I have to get up. I get the Herald Tribune delivered and crispy bacon on French bread, pain au chocolat and coffee. Cern is one big physics lab, so if you wore anything that looked like you bought it last year, you’d look stylish. It’s a 20-minute walk away, through a little French village, St Genis, with chocolate and bread shops, and across the border into Switzerland. You can see Mont Blanc — it’s absolutely beautiful.

I’ve always been a scientist, always. From as far back as I can remember I wanted to do something about space exploration or astronomy. Apparently, even when I was a year old, I’d watch anything to do with Apollo and the moon landing. I didn’t go to university until I was 22. Instead I joined a rock band called Dare. We made two albums and toured for a few years. Then we had a fight in a bar in Berlin and split up. I came back and rang Manchester University and said: “Right, I want to come to university now and do physics.”

The Cern complex is huge, and it goes across the border, so you can go into it in France and come out in Switzerland without a passport check. There used not to be a gate in France until Jacques Chirac wanted to visit and the French said: “We have to have a gate because we keep telling him it’s a French lab, and you can only get in from Switzerland.”

It’s an odd job — a fantastic job, actually. Your job description is “Find out how the universe works — and here’s this E6 billion machine that you can use to do it.” The aim of the project is to find the origin of mass in the universe. That really means: “Why is this table solid?” Everything indicates that when the universe began, everything was exactly like light — it travelled around at the speed of light and had no mass. As it expanded and cooled, something happened to cause the things that make up me and you to get heavy. To get mass. We know exactly where in time that happened, but we don’t know exactly what it was that happened. This machine’s been built specifically to go to that place and watch that process unfold. We might not have thought of what turns up, but we know we’ve got to see it.

Lunch is at 12. It’s a bit of a race. If you go at 12.10 the canteen is packed with thousands of physicists. There’s a lot of mingling — it’s legendary for that. It’s full of people talking about physics. They have brilliant cakes, really great elaborate things with cream and chocolate.

What we’re doing here really is as exciting as I think it sounds. It’s exploration, just like going to the moon or to Mars, or looking over the horizon to somewhere you’ve never seen before. It’s exactly the same, except you’re doing it on a really small scale — looking at structures and distances and tiny things. The particle accelerator we’re building is a massive ring with a 27-kilometre circumference, buried about 100 metres underground. It’s cold inside that tube — -271C, colder than space. When it turns on — in a couple of months, we hope — it’ll be the biggest fridge in the world. And then what we’ll do is whiz a proton beam around one way — 11,000 times a second, with as much energy as an aircraft carrier going at 30mph — and whiz another proton beam around the other way. And then, we smash them together — up to 600m times a second.

In that moment of collision — less than a billionth of a second — you get extreme conditions, like the very early universe. You get a massive amount of energy, and loads of things flying out — like the debris of the collision. It can also form new particles that have never been seen before. And that’s what we’re really after. The area of the machine that’s closest to the collisions is in an immense cavern, bigger than St Paul’s Cathedral. It’s like a giant camera — 7,000 tonnes — and takes pictures, so you can see what’s happened. Someone once said it’s like getting two Swiss watches and smashing them together, and then looking at the bits and trying to work out what was inside and how it works.

They start serving alcohol around 3 in the canteen, so people start drinking a little bit of red wine, getting more energetic and chatty. The trick with this kind of project is to think out of the box. You have to find a way of teasing out the interesting details, and that’s a creative process. It’s really up to you; you can be clever. At the moment our knowledge stops at really profound places, like: “Why is gravity such a weak force? The whole planet is pulling this glass down, yet I can just pick it up.” That’s a huge mystery. Understanding it would lead to a complete reassessment of how the universe works.

At around 7 everyone goes for a beer, then they do a bit more physics, and then they go out. I’ll usually iChat on the computer to Gia and Moki before going for a meal — perhaps at the Coq Rouge, a short walk to the village. I ramble back to my room around 11. Usually I’ve drunk about a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape — the wines are very good here. If I’m lucky, I take my clothes off. But I can’t fall asleep without reading. At the moment it’s God Is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens, which is very good. It won’t be physics, though, or I wouldn’t go to sleep.

By Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe.

Portrait by Ersoy Emin

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