Big Bang Day for Radio Waves - moving from the page that has been its home for the past eight years and, from later this month, taking up residence on the Saturday listings pages. Should not a column about radio be as portable as the medium itself?

Big Bang Day, too, in quite a different way, on Radio 4. Like the rest of the BBC, it is run by arts graduates, but, this Wednesday, it champions the hardest and most awesome of all scientific subjects, physics. Between dawn and dusk runs a remarkable series of programmes, marking the world’s biggest scientific endeavour since the Apollo moon landings - the switch-on of a gigantic particle collider on the French-Swiss border, replicating that billionth of a second after the original, hypothetical Big Bang that supposedly set the universe in motion.

The day begins with Today, co-presented from Geneva (6am), and ends with a comedy called The Genuine Particle, written by Steve Punt (11.30pm). In between is much talent. Andrew Marr, fresh from both his dazzling aerial traverse of Britain and his mysterious injunction forbidding fellow journalists to probe his private life, reports at regular intervals from the control room of Cern, Europe’s particle-physics headquarters. Adam Hart-Davis descends 301ft into the collider itself to bring an amazingly vivid report on its underground tubes and some of the 10,000 workers employed (9am). Ben Miller, who quit a postgraduate course on quantum physics to become a comedian, appears in both the entertaining Physics Rocks (11am, with contributions by enthusiasts such as Alan Alda and Eddie Izzard) and his own series, The Great Big Particle Adventure (9pm), the clearest exposition I have ever heard of electrons, protons, neutrons, nuclei, quarks and those elusive Higgs particles that the proton-firing experiment will try to detect.

Even drama is involved. The afternoon play (2.15pm) is a special Cern-set edition of BBC TV’s Torchwood, with the beguiling half-Ghanaian, half-Iranian actress Freema Agyeman making her radio debut in the same role she played in Doctor Who, that of Martha Jones: very sympathetic she is too, apart from an annoying tendency to pronounce “HQ” as “Haytch-Queue”.

As the child of a physics professor, I have always lamented my ignorance of the subject and have learnt much from preview copies of the shows already made, including basics such as the fact (explained in Simon Singh’s excellent afternoon series Five Particles) that atoms get their name from the Greek word for “uncuttable”, which is what they were once thought to be.

This is the sort of output we pay the licence fee for, the sort of ambitious and expensive programming no commercial radio station could ever hope to do in the present ecology of broadcasting. Big Bang Day displays one of radio’s great strengths: its ability to convey the excitement of ideas and human curiosity. It also demonstrates its obvious limitation: the absence of vision, which is particularly constricting when it comes to showing how things work. The more Hart-Davis described the cathedral-sized caverns and the 6,000 magnets being cooled by liquid helium, the more I hungered and thirsted to see what it all looks like.

There are also obvious questions that don’t appear to have been asked so far. At £4 billion, is the collider really worth it? What is the point of trying to find the Higgs particle, given that its existence can already be shown theoretically; and, if it is not found, will that make physicists rewrite the textbooks? And where did the matter that exploded in the first Big Bang come from?

All the same, it is a grand day for Radio 4, whether or not, as Alda suggests, in the manner of Donald Rumsfeld, that the experiment will give us answers to questions we haven’t even yet posed.

paul.donovan@sunday-times.co.uk

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