WDATAM: What Do All Those Acronyms Mean?
The Columbus Dispatch has a nice article by Kevin Mayhood called Rock The Universe where among other things they spell out what all those crazy detector acronyms stand for, and what each detector aims to do.
LHC: Large Hadron Collider (duh?)
ATLAS: A Toroidal LHC Apparatus
CMS: Compact Muon Solenoid
ALICE: A Large Ion Collider Experiment
I think it is really hard to argue that evil conspiratorial scientists would knowingly take any odds to end the universe in a machine called Alice or one whose name is self referential acronym. (ed. note: Save the self referencing names for PHP and GNU. Heh.)
I guess you could make the argument for ALICE referencing Alice in Wonderland and her time- and space-bending trip through the rabbit hole being the same as how the LHC is a time machine that is going to suck us all into a black hole or portal to another dimension… Wait, never mind.
