In Bill Bryson’s seminal book about science, A Short History of Nearly Everything, he describes his moment of revelation. “I was on a long flight across the Pacific, staring idly out of the window at a moonlit ocean, when it occurred to me with a certain uncomfortable forcefulness that I didn’t know anything about the only planet I was ever going to live on.”

And thus started a journey which has transformed Bryson into the thinking scientist’s favourite layman. In this our second issue of Eureka, Bryson describes his visit to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. There, deep under the French and Swiss landscape, lies an extraordinary attempt to understand the only Universe that we will ever live in. To visit CERN is to be amazed by the passion, skill and brains of the thousands of physicists, engineers and computer scientists working on the project.

The iconic image from CERN is of the giant particle detectors. The detectors, and the man-made caverns that hold them, are awe-inspiring, on a scale imaginable only to those who have stood, neck cricked and mesmerised, looking up at the dome of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, or St Peter’s in Rome. For those unlikely to see the LHC up close, Bryson’s guide is a pretty good second best. He is, as his millions of avid readers will aver, the perfect travelling companion; whether the journey is through Britain’s B&Bs or to the centre of the atom.

From the mysteries of the atom, Eureka travels deep inside the human body; this time our guide is less affable than Bryson. Robot surgeons are coming to a hospital near you. It may lack the romance of traditional surgery — no mopped brows and lingering looks over the sutures for these surgeons — but the future of medical science is mechanised.

Advances in medicine are one factor in our extraordinarily rapid increases in longevity. Professor Colin Blakemore, our Great Mind for November, examines longevity and the horrifying prospect that we may crack the secret of living for ever. If that happens, and the future looms interminably ahead, the only antidote to infinite boredom will be intelligent, beautifully crafted things to read. Such as Bill Bryson on physics, perhaps?

Enjoy.

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