Looking through the evolution of experimental physics in the twentieth century, anyone can get the impression of how our experiments are stepping to a new age. The age in which old table top and rather cheap setups are being replaced by enormous multi country projects that are usually extremely expensive.
The age of small laboratories are becoming to an end. Our theoretical models demand observations that can test the laws of nature in extreme cases, such as ultra high energies or very small temperatures. This task can not be accomplished without investing millions of dollars, employing hundreds of scientists and technicians, and powering with sophisticated data analysis technology. Just as a glimpse of the astonishing success that physicists have achieved in the light of these huge projects, I want to point to LHC.
In LHC, we accelerate beams of nucleons to the energy as high as 7 TeV and smash them together and track scatterings with extremely tiny cross sections out of billions of events. In this big machine protons are travelling at 0.99997828 times the speed of light. To get an impression of how accurate this device is, it is interesting to know that the measurements should be corrected due to the moon's gravitational effects and the electrical currents produced by high-speed trains that leave Geneva.
I want to stress that LHC is not the only one. There are other huge projects such as LIGO, LISA, Pierre Auger Observatory, ...
Did you know that employing the laser technology we are at a place to measure the distance of the Earth to the Moon with the accuracy of one millimeter?!!!
Isn't it amazing?
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