They are a bit bigger IRL

Yes, I am actually in that building right now (I work there). And it’s 15 stories tall.

Miniaturization has clearly come a long way in the big pharma universe…

To be fair, you can make a much smaller hadron collider. It’s just that the ones people care about are the biggest ones possible, since those are useful for research. And they do use (much smaller) hadron accelerators for medicine, although they use them by colliding the beam with cancer cells, not with drugs.

BTW this isn’t even the largest one on the world. This is the second-largest hadron collider currently, and is actually not running any more since the largest one is so much better. A lot the people in that building (my dad included) actually work on the largest hadron collider in Europe, it’s an international collaboration.

I honestly thought it was much bigger.

#thatswhatshesaid

The Large Hadron Collider (which is probably where the BP Hadron Collider got its name) is quite a bit bigger. In this photo…

the tiny red circle is the collider at the lab where I work, the orange circle is the LHC, the current biggest accelerator, and the yellow circle is a proposed accelerator that I don’t think is actually going to happen. Instead I think they are converting the tunnel from the Tevatron (the bigger red ring) into a Muon collider (or more generally, a Lepton collider, where Lepton is the counterpart to Hadron) and using the smaller ring into a source that sends neutrinos (also leptons) to a detector in South Dakota. The neutrino project is planned to be an international collaboration like the LHC, so the Europeans can come over here and give us a hand for once. :stuck_out_tongue:

But in any case, if you compare the orange ring in that picture with, say, the city of Chicago in the right, you can tell that the Large Hadron Collider definitely lives up to the Large in its name.