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It will be the moment of truth for a concerted collaborative effort by thousands of scientists from more than 20 countries that has spanned more than a decade and has cost billions of dollars. If successful, the LCH will, among several extraordinary things, let man see the universe born again, and again, and again - 30 million times a second, to be exact.

After excruciating months of witnessing the disintegration of our country's politics and unity, the senselessness and hopelessness of the situation in my homeland, the futile and self-serving, ill-placed sense of honour that belies cowardice and betrays the true meaning of dignity, the lies, the misguided self-righteousness, the distorted, as well as thwarted, ideals, and the horror of our growing social cancer, I started looking around for something else that represents hope and possibility.

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars," said Oscar Wilde in "Lord Darlington", Act III, and I found myself in search of those stars to help me cope with this rather loony universe. Then I found one that represents the best hope and the worst fear generated by man's zealous, age-old quest for understanding and learning about our universe.

The LCH, built by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, or CERN, is to date the most powerful particle accelerator, or "atom-smasher". It possesses the capability to create micro black holes - sub-atomic versions of cosmic black holes - that would enable man to understand more of how our universe came to pass billions of years ago.

The collider could find evidence of other dimensions, 10 perhaps, in addition to the three spatial dimensions our senses experience. These dimensions could provide explanations for the super-string theory that deals with quarks, the smallest particles known to date, that make up atoms. The LHC even has the capability to produce some other hypothetical killer particles known as "strangelets".

The project has its critics. They contend that the super-collider could exceed physicists' wildest conjecture and cause cataclysmic outcomes. They even took their case to the courts to put a stop to the development of the LCH complex. They argue that the black holes created by the super-collider would do what black holes do - swallow up the earth and its surroundings. The dangerous strangelets, hypothetical particles, could also turn the planet into a hot, dead cluster.

Not so, argue the proponents of the project, who happen to be among the best and brightest physicists in the world; there is no "conceivable danger" associated with the LCH - an exercise of cosmic leapfrogging - coming to life. A physicist who participated in the project has estimated that the chance of the accelerator producing a global catastrophe is one in 50 million, about the same odds as winning some lotteries. Not quite a comforting consolation when there have been numerous winners of lotteries!

Basically the collider will produce a collision, at the speed of light, in a ring of super-cooled magnets, of two opposing beams of protons. Their temperature, to be kept at minus 456 Fahrenheit - colder than the void between galaxies - requires CERN to build the world's biggest cryonic system to handle the 185,000 gallons of liquid helium that will be used to chill the magnets. The ring is 17 miles in circumference and buried 330 feet underground. Attached along the ring is a series of cylindrical detectors to record information as the paths of these beams cross and collide. Two of the largest detectors are huge digital cameras each weighing thousands of tons, capable of taking millions of snapshots a second. Each year the detectors will generate 15 petabytes of data, equivalent to a stack of DVDs 12 miles tall. The amount of data to be analysed and studied alone represents a challenge that requires an enormous, high-speed global computer network.

Scientists plan to hunt for signs of the invisible "dark matter" and "dark energy" that make up more than 96 per cent of the universe, and hope to get a glimpse of the elusive, postulated "Higgs boson" or "God Particle", a so-far undiscovered particle thought to give matter its mass.

The collider could find evidence of extra dimensions of space and time that could answer questions on the super-string theory, which holds that quarks, the particles that make up the atoms, are infinitesimal vibrating strings. Nobody has ever seen a Higgs boson, but theoretically it should be producible in particle accelerators.

Scientists believe that if the Higgs, or something like it, does not exist, then some very basic things like quantum mechanics are wrong. The stakes are high. As one scientist puts it: "Either we find the Higgs boson or some strange phenomenon must happen." Failure of the LCH would leave theorists with nothing more to do and a world in which basic questions would remain forever unanswered.

CERN is where the World Wide Web was born in the early 1990s. Established in 1954, CERN sits amid vineyards and farmland in the countryside outside Geneva. This picture-perfect pastoral scene hardly seems like ground zero for doomsday. Locals don't seem to be a bit concerned as September 10 approaches; a day that could forever change history and our understanding of our planet.

Einstein, whose relativity theory of mass and energy is one of the bases of the LCH experiment, once said two things were infinite: the universe and human stupidity. But he was not even sure about the former. He was one of the participants of the Manhattan Project under which atomic bombs were created. Upon the realisation of the horrifying, catastrophic potential the invention could inflict on humankind, he experienced profound regret. Einstein, a pacifist at heart, ended up as one of the fathers of a weapon that can annihilate the planet. He epitomises the best and the worst in all of us.

That's a human irony on a scale that should make my miseries pale. It tells me that maybe I should look beyond today and beyond all of our country's current woes that seem to be leading us towards a collision of a different kind.