Science is awesome. And thanks to the internet age, it's easy to be witness to that fact. For example? This beautiful image of the photomultiplier tubes in the Daya Bay Neutrino Experiment detectors, which mesmerized millions when it started circulating online this week.
However, some of us questioned what we saw, asking how the image could possibly be real. So for your viewing pleasure—and for the skeptics out there—here is a collection of similarly huge and fantastical scientific experiments and machinery.
Photomultiplier tubes inside the Daya Bay neutrino detector, a multinational particle physics project studying neutrinos, at the reactor complex in Daya Bay, China.
Photo: Berkeley Lab
Super-Kamiokande, a large Cherenkov detector operated by Japan, the United States, Korea, China, Poland and Spain. The detector is located 3,000 feet underground in the Kamioka-mine, Hida-city, Gifu, Japan.
Photo: Kamioka Observatory, ICRR (Institute for Cosmic ray Research, The University of Tokyo
The ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus) particle detector experiment, constructed at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator at CERN in Switzerland.
Photo: Claudia Marcelloni/CERN
The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, one of two large general-purpose particle physics detectors of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
Photo: Maximilien Brice/CERN
The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO), exterior and interior. It is located more than a mile underground in Vale Inco's Creighton Mine in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada.
Photo: Roy Kaltschmidt/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
The Borexino Experiment, located at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso near the town of L'Aquila, Italy, measures the solar neutrino flux and its day/night asymmetry.
Photo: Borexino Collaboration
The late Cockcroft Walton generator of Fermilab. Sadly, it's been decommissioned.
Photo: Reidar Hahn/Fermilab Visual Media Services
The Z machine, or the Z Pulsed Power Facility, is the largest X-ray generator in the world, designed to test materials in extreme conditions. It is located in Albuquerque, N.M., at Sandia National Laboratories. The electromagnetic pulse causes impressive lightning when the machine is discharged.
Photo: Sandia Labs
Gammasphere, a gamma ray detector at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.
Photo: Roy Kaltschmidt/Marilee B Bailey/University of California, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Inside the Joint European Torus (JET) vessel, the largest tokamak in the world, which investigates the potential of fusion power at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, Oxford, England.
Photo: EFDA-JET
The interior of the target chamber of the National Ignition Facility (NIF), the world's largest laser, located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Photo: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
The James Webb Space Telescope's primary mirror segments in the cryogenic testing chamber at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center.
Photo: David Higginbotham/NASA/MSFC
The Large Diameter Centrifuge (LDC) at ESA's European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) at Noordwijk in the Netherlands.
Photo: ESA
Inside the Large Space Simulator at ESA’s test centre in the Netherlands.
Photo: ESA
Top photo by Roy Kaltschmidt, Berkeley Lab
Are there any other amazing scientific machines missing from this collection? Show us in the discussion below!