The article "Monsters of the universe" contained a variety of interesting units to describe the world's biggest physics experiments, including tennis courts, African elephants, the Colosseum, the Australian Capital Territory and a blue whale (28 August,
The article "Monsters of the universe" contained a variety of interesting units to describe the world's biggest physics experiments, including tennis courts, African elephants, the Colosseum, the Australian Capital Territory and a blue whale (28 August, p 26).
I am puzzled, however, by the Large Hadron Collider: it is 27 kilometres round and "you could squeeze Bermuda, Monaco and four Vatican Cities into the area bounded by the LHC". How do you squeeze an island over 20 kilometres long into a ring with a diameter of about 8.6 kilometres? Is there some extra dimension to the LHC that will enable it to find the Higgs particle?
• Apologies to Bermudans, but the main island is narrow and if you squish it (conserving area), it fits.
To continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access to all of newscientist.com, including 20 years of archive content.