Scientists are preparing to smash protons together in a 27-kilometre tunnel deep underground, in the hopes of detecting extra dimensions, 'dark matter' and the mysterious Higgs boson -- the so-called 'God particle.'

The experiments are designed to re-create what happened immediately after the Big Bang.

"As far as we know, a very long time ago there was an enormous amount of energy that suddenly created space and time as we know it," Bob Orr, a physics professor at the University of Toronto, told CTV Newsnet on Tuesday.

"This energy degraded itself into a lot of particles, and these are the particles we see around us that make up matter. So, the stuff that you're made of is quarks and electrons that were produced in this Big Bang."

The tests will be conducted using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located underneath the French-Swiss border, in the European Organization for Nuclear Research laboratory -- better known by its French acronym CERN.

The amount of data expected from the experiments will be so huge, CERN will use 60,000 computers around the world to help calculate the results. It's called the LHC Grid.

On Wednesday, scientists will make their first test run, sending a laser beam around the tunnel that will mark the path of the particles. In late October, they'll start sending clouds of particles on a collision course at the speed of light.

"Two protons will collide, and the quarks inside the protons will collide with each other," said Orr. "There will be something like a fireball of energy, and this will make new particles -- things like Higgs bosons."

Scientists believe the Higgs boson particle may be responsible for giving mass to everything in the universe. But it's never actually been discovered and remains a theory.

Canadians have helped design some of the technology that will study the aftermath of the collisions.

TRIUMF, a particle and nuclear physics laboratory at the University of British Columbia, helped design a detector called ATLAS. It's a long narrow tube, roughly the width of a pop can, and weighs 7,000 tonnes.

ATLAS will send data back to labs around the world, including TRIUMF, which will then send the information to five Canadian universities to crunch the numbers: the University of Toronto, Montreal's McGill University, Edmonton's University of Alberta, the University of Victoria and Simon Fraser University in B.C.

With files from The Canadian Press and The Associated Press