• Question: What is the biggest thing you use in experiments?

    Asked by britishbeef to Laura, Lily, Mark, Paul, Sarah on 22 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Lily Asquith

      Lily Asquith answered on 21 Jun 2010:

      The ATLAS detector at the LHC is about half the size of St Paul’s cathedral. The picture of me on this page has part of the ATLAS detector in the background. It weighs 7000 tonnes and is the largest particle detector ever constructed.

    • Photo: Mark Roberts

      Mark Roberts answered on 21 Jun 2010:

      The biggest thing is probably the microscope that I use which cost 250,000 pounds!

      I’m always terrified I’m going to break it.

    • Photo: Sarah Bardsley

      Sarah Bardsley answered on 21 Jun 2010:

      My work doesn’t involve doing classical experiments. So I guess the biggest thing I use in my job in my computer!

    • Photo: Laura Maliszewski

      Laura Maliszewski answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      The biggest thing I’ve used is probably a DNA sequencer.

    • Photo: Paul Roche

      Paul Roche answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      I have used satellites in space that are the size of a coach, and a telescope in Hawaii that is 10-metres in diameter – but I suspect Lily has used the biggest human-made “experiment” of all of us, as the LHC is pretty vast!

      I suppose technically I do experiments with stars, which are pretty huge (e.g. Sun is 1.2 million km in diameter, and some of the stars I work on would fill the solar system out to Saturns orbit), and I weigh black hole sthat are 20 time sthe mass of the Sun – does that count??

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