"Three kilometers" the team leader guiding our visit proudly announced, extending his left arm towards the focal point at the end of the tunnel. It really makes no difference you have already read all about it, only experiencing the massive scale of the actual experiment gives the real measure of the technological challenge. And that measure seems still out of reach, despite numbers and figures show otherwise. Three kilometers, I knew, and I knew the answer too but I asked him nonetheless to what accuracy, and he promptly replied, somewhat snappy, providing another infinitesimal figure, another token of the extremes characterising experimental work in gravitational wave physics.
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