It may have been the local rum punches, but to me the similarities between the two projects were clear-cut. The collider is a gargantuan structure at the European Center for Nuclear Research, called CERN, that scientists have built over generations to help them connect the smallest and largest structures in the universe, and perhaps make sense of why the cosmos is so hospitable to life.
Sans particles, Xunantunich was designed to do more or less the same thing in the Central American hills. Instead of quarks and leptons, the friezes ringing the pyramid depict the gods of heaven, earth and the underworld, and humanity’s place among them.
Collisions - When Mortals Work on Cosmic Time - Considering the CERN Large Hadron Collider
