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.

He is one of around 2,000 physicists, including those from Tel Aviv University and the Weizmann Institute, who have been working on Atlas. He tells People: "This was the biggest science project anyone has ever been involved with. Starting the accelerator will give us the collision and then, they sky's the limit. In a few weeks we will be able to start our analyses. We want to learn more about mass and hopefully we will be able to from the collision.

"It's an amazing collaboration. It was definitely one of the most significant days in physics history."

Professor Rozen has been making regular trips to the Cern laboratories over the past few years. He lives in Northern Israel.