Yoram Rozen helps solve the mysteries of the universe at Cern in the world’s biggest-ever scientific experiment

So, last week's "Big Bang" experiment was not the end of the world as we know it. But it was certainly a life-changing moment for leading Israeli physicist Yoram Rozen.

Professor Rozen, 46, was among the estimated 10,000 people who helped design last Wednesday's monumental experiment, which aims to capture an image of the conditions that existed a billionth of a second after the Big Bang, and shed light on the nature of physics. It is one of the most ambitious and expensive scientific experiments on record, costing £5 billion ($8 billion).

Scientists fired two beams of particles called protons around the 27km-long tunnel accelerator, which houses the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), at Cern, the European nuclear-research centre outside Geneva, to bring them into collision.

Professor Rozen has devoted more than a decade to working on the design and construction of what is known as the Atlas project, a large detector built by Cern that will collect and measure the collisions of the protons.