Big Bang Brain-ache

I shouldn't really say this, but we've been writing a story today which we don't actually understand.

In Switzerland, scientists are trying to recreate the conditions after the 'Big Bang', when the universe came into being.

Inside a 17 mile tunnel, particles are being smashed together with cataclysmic force, at almost the speed of light.

The idea is to understand how the earth and everything around it came into begin.

But those last few sentences are very general - they don't get anywhere near the science.

And - we decided this morning - it's beyond us.

Hugh Broom seemed to have some idea - shouting stuff across the newsroom about 'protons', whatever they are, before disappearing back into his travel bunker to count road cones.

The rest of us, though, reckoned that GCSE biology was just about OK, but chemistry, and especially physics, were from another planet.

And I've never really understood, by the way, why people who are good at English and history and languages at school are often rubbish at science, and vice versa.

There's a sort of mental divide.

Of course, some people can do both, and they're simply astonishingly intelligent.

For the rest of us, though, it's one or the other.

I can write a sentence (sort of) but will never be able to understand this particle accelerator whatsit thingy in Geneva.

And if I did get it, I might be wearing a cardie and sandals, be smoking a pipeful of aromatic shag, and like collecting model railway locomotives from 1896.

But wouldn't it be rather wonderful to have a good grasp of how we got here? To have a brain the size of Professor Stephen Hawking's?

To live inside his mind for one day would be - literally - to enter another world.