Andy Martin: Seduced by Cern, but not convinced

The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard once said: "There are really only two interesting moments in history: the Big Bang and the Apocalypse." Throwing the ignition switch of the new Cern accelerator has managed to combine the two, with talk both of working out how the universe began and/or bringing it to a premature close.

If it was a movie, you could call it Apocalypse and Genesis Now. In fact, in many ways, it already is a movie, a Hollywood-style blockbuster with very expensive special effects, or at least a trailer for great scientific discoveries to come.

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Hype is normal in science. We want the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. What we get is always something less than that. Naturally the "super collider" has to be sold. The question is: has it been mis-sold?

The Cern machine is essentially an extremely large cocktail shaker in which very small chunks of matter are being swished around. It is being touted as an underground cathedral in which God will finally be revealed. Cern is the new focal point for the technological sublime.

What is it about the Big Bang that makes it irresistible? I am as seduced by it as anyone – and have been combing time and space for a book called Beware Invisible Cows: My Search For the Source of the Universe. Hamlet fantasised about being able to put infinite space in a nutshell. Jorge Luis Borges dreamed of the "Aleph", a microcosm that would contain the entirety of the cosmos. Cosmology gradually pieced together the story of the "Primeval Atom" out of which everything sprang.

We are sucked in by the theory of the origin because it promises to whisk us out of the sorry mess we have made of everything and take us back, at the speed of light (or nearly), to Paradise and the cradle of Creation.

There is a gaping contradiction at the heart of the collider story. If we really knew all the stuff we are supposed to know about the Big Bang, then we wouldn't need all this massive apparatus in the first place. Even Stephen Hawking seems to have abandoned his talk of the "singularity", infinite density wrapped up in zero space, which was supposed to provide an opening trumpet blast and a full stop in the history of time. Everything is flux after all (and before it).

The paradoxes of the singularity have given rise to the theory of the Big Bounce, according to which there never is a zero state. Every new universe is born out of the shreds and patches of an old one.

A more promising empirical alternative is the quest for gravitational waves. Terrestrial telescopes and Hubble allow us to see some 13 billion years back in time. But an interferometer in space might, in theory at least, enable us to go all the way and witness our own origins, rather than recreate them in an underground chamber.

If the "many-worlds" thesis, first formulated by Hugh Everett in 1957, is true, then we don't really need a lot of expensive hardware. In this version of quantum theory, new universes are forever branching off from the old one. Every door you walk through is a potential gateway. It is going to make a lot of difference what you do in the next five minutes. God is not confined to Geneva. Genesis begins here.

Andy Martin's 'Beware Invisible Cows: My Search for the Source of the Universe' will be published next year by Simon & Schuster