Letter: Bigger than Bermuda?

From Brian Horton

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?

Valerie Jamieson writes:

• Apologies to Bermudans, but the main island is narrow and if you squish it (conserving area), it fits.

Kings Meadows, Tasmania Australia