Reflecting microscopes, in which the image is magnified through concave mirrors rather than convex lenses, were brought to their peak of perfection in 1947 by British physicist C.R. Burch, who made a series of giant instruments that used ultraviolet rays.
They have built 22 giant instruments, all of which are designed to be operated with the elephant's trunk or with a stick held in the trunk.
The control room of the cyclotron would be open, and there would be operator Jimmy Vale, methodically tuning the giant instrument.
As I entered Llandaff's grand gothic nave, the giant instrument was being tuned by James Atherton, a Metallica and Mozart-loving former drummer and now expert organ surgeon.
It still rankles among some American physicists that their own giant instrument-to-be, the Superconducting Super Collider, was cancelled for being too costly.
If you had never heard the music and only read the biographies (or seen the documentaries with the sound off), you'd be left with a sense of bigness: big voice, big manner, big entertainer — a brawling guy, a sort of pop Pavarotti, a crooner Caruso, a guy blessed with a giant instrument that sets plaster falling from the ceiling, but who didn't use his instrument well or have much taste.
The EHT is an effort to harness together existing radio telescopes scattered across the globe and use them as one giant instrument.
ALMA, sited high up in the mountains of northern Chile and still under construction, is also orders of magnitude sharper and more sensitive than similar telescopes because it is made up of many separate dishes 66 when completed all working together as one giant instrument.
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Known as Portée/, the "minimalist, monumental and interactive" music score, as the artists call it, reimagines the centuries-old space as a giant instrument.
Our grandsons love the Wood Vibrations Trail in Margam Country Park, a few miles south of Port Talbot, where giant musical instruments have been carved from felled trees.
