Acronyms

So physics is filed with more acronyms then you can shake a stick at, and getting into a new experiment always confronts you with a new vocabulary of three to five letter non-words. Until today I had not idea ATLAS (the name of the experiment I am now working on) was in fact just another acronym, I had thought that they had simply chosen the name because the main physics goal is to find something called the higgs, which ultimately is supposed to be responsible for matter having mass. While I am sure that is the motivation for this particular name, ATLAS stand for ... Hold you breath ... A Toroidal Lhc ApparatuS. Yeah I know, I was disappointed too, but hey the experiment is still way cool.