Scientific Artifacts from the Sky

I was looking at Google maps at a location near Chicago, so I scooted over to take a look at Fermilab (map). As always, I was struck first by the sheer beauty of the arrangement, and next by how wonderful it is that we human beings would undertake such a massive project just to better understand the laws of nature. And finally, of course, by the irony that it takes something this big to examine particles on very small scales. Blame the wave nature of matter for that: to look at short distances, you need high energies, and that means a whomping big accelerator.