The world did not end, or even move, but it did watch, agog, as some very small things belted along a very long tube to produce a result, in scientific terms, that is very big indeed.

I am still a bit foggy about what a Large Hadron Collider actually does. Until yesterday, I thought Higgs boson served with Captain Pugwash. I failed my physics O level spectacularly.

But even a complete scientific ignoramus could not fail to be affected by the occasion, the scale of technology involved and the strained hyperbole of television presenters trying to describe a momentous event they didn’t understand any more profoundly than the rest of us.

Lots of scientists gathered in what seemed to be an aircraft hangar looking nervous. There was a hitch. This was apparently solved by switching the machine on and off again, which is exactly what I do with the DVD player. “Zree, two — ha ha ha, one. Nuzzing. Yes!” said a Swiss voice. Then there was champagne, and men with beards patting one another on the back.

Protons, being so small, don’t make great television, but producers leapt into that void with a blizzard of moving graphics, wobbly pictures of planets and whizzing shapes.

The event has clearly uncovered new cultural worlds. As its daily logo, Google adopted an image in which two elongated sparkplugs appeared to be kissing in a flash of light. Kate McAlpine, a 23-year-old science writer, put up a Large Hadron Collider rap video on YouTube: by last night, it had been watched nearly two million times.

“The LHC accelerates The protons and the lead And the things that it discovers Will rock you in the head.” It has inspired a raft of copycat videos, remixes and even “an extreme chill-out experience” for anyone contemplating the beginning, or the end, of the Universe.

The whole event had a strange, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy feel, as if, at any moment, someone might pop up and declare the answer to be “42”.

“To infinity and beyond,” declared Kay Burley, of Sky TV.

The numbers came in battalions: 800 million particle collisions a second, 27 kilometres of tube, 4.4 billion protons, walloping into each other at 99.9 per cent of the speed of light in temperatures 100,000 times hotter than the Sun.

For nonscientists, there was something almost mystical about the way it was presented, leaving commentators reaching for mixed metaphors: “It is like sending a beam of light smaller than the width of a human hair at the speed of a jumbo jet,” said one explicator. “That’s what they have done here. And they are jolly pleased.”

I was jolly pleased too, though for the more prosaic reason that we had not all been ground up into fresh primordial soup in another big bang. “The world will not come to an end,” said Stephen Hawking.

But the world has now changed. For a start, we know that a hadron is a bound state of quarks, and that the doom-prophets were wrong, as usual, their quark being far worse than their bite.

And if the scientists cannot yet tell us exactly how our world has changed, and precisely what it will all mean, then that is simply the nature of exploration and discovery.

Columbus knew he would find something, but not exactly what it would be, and no one asked him what he had discovered until he got back.

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