With smallpox gone, should we worry about other-sized poxes?
The poultry-kind of pox happens pretty regularly.
“Great pox” was a contemporary term for syphilis.
Cowpox, which was used to vaccinate against smallpox, was a much less serious disease, but caused larger pustules to develop on the skin, as does chicken pox. The name “smallpox” derives from the small (but numerous) pustules that the disease causes.
This reminds me of a Laurie Anderson concert I went to once – she had a bit about the “Large Hadron Collider”, wondering if they had to name it that to distinguish it from the “Small Hadron Collider” and the “Medium-sized Hadron Collider”.
It’s so rare that artists talk about the Large Hadron Collider – I found it funny and memorable.
Let’s look the other direction for tiny pox and nano pox etc…
Well, yes. It is a good deal larger than hadron colliders that had been built before, and it size was very much relevant both to its capabilities and its cost.
Anderson is from west suburban Chicagoland, which is also the home of Fermilab. We take our particle accelerators seriously out here, especially when those cheese-holing neutrality monkeys got a bigger one, dammit!
Yes, but they’re called Grande Pox and Venti Pox.
So – Is the Large Hadron Collider
[ol][li] A large collider of hadrons? Or, …[/li][li] A collider of large hadrons?[/ol][/li]I’m pretty sure the correct answer is (2), from which the device gets its name. But I don’t doubt for one plancktime that, in order to accomplish (2), that (1) must also necessarily be true.
The correct pocksizes, BTW, are Mediumpox and Largepox. These are what you get if you stand in the wrong place at the wrong time inside the correspondingly-sized collider. There’s also theoretically SuperSizePox, the collider for which hasn’t been built yet.
One can find numerous headlines in various newspapers and magazines, about the Large Hadron Collider, in which Hadron is misspelled Hardon. It is possible that a few of these instances may actually be, y’know, accidental typos.
Actually it’s (1).
And I think you’re kind of off with the second thing too. One of the objectives with a device such as the LHC is to create collisions of such high energy they could create hypothetical particles with large masses e.g. WIMPs. Though there are various proposed ideas for how you could build a collider that took up less physical space (and so could be cheaper in some respects), ultimately it is high-energy physics we’re talking.
So the successor is unlikely to be the pocket-size hadron collider.
(Hopefully a physicist will appear to convert what I just said into science-speak (but not find any errors))
Just to be clear a pock is a pustule or vesicle, the plural being pocks or pox. Thus, as stated above, smallpox refers to the small pocks or pustules caused by the disease.