What was inconceivable yesterday will be mundane tomorrow.

Reminds me of how most physics books with »modern« in their titles are from the 60s.

"modern c++", checked amazon. there are 5 out of 5 on the first line, and more in the list, with many variations.

And the Modern Age ended at the time of the Industrial Revolution.

Books are an understandable phenomenon. They were supposed to disappear before the stuff they describe stops being valid. But we have a nasty tendency of naming permanent things "modern".

But anyway, it reminds me on how if you want a real textbook that covers a math or physics subject with all the details, you need to get the one named "fundamentals of X". If you go and get the "advanced X", it has a superficial and incomplete description that won't help you with anything.

As a non physicist, I'd like to see some titles. I feel that the sixties were a watershed decade and am interested in examples.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

I want to see your slide deck and presentation about getting the Big Mundane Telescope approved. By want, I mean, would never

https://xkcd.com/1294/ :-)

Tom Scott has a great video about why the ELT is already likely the largest telescope that will ever be built https://youtu.be/QqRREz0iBes?si=tC3Py0W6vqXbZAbq

I didn’t have time to watch yet, but did he take into consideration lunar crater telescopes? I always thought that would be an excellent reason to establish a lunar base.

Is there not a cost towards it being so large that it becomes comically too large to clean?

They mentioned in this article that this mirror is so large that the mirror segments cannot support their own weight.

Ever is a very long time.

LLT (ludicrously large telescope)

There's always Plaid beyond Ludicrous:-(

BFT

(I let you guess, but that's a close cousin of the BFG)

The 'F' is silent, as I put it when explaining what RTFM meant to an elderly relative.

Haha that's actually really clever!

FYI it's generally accepted that F stands for Fine if you don’t want to swear :)

Same with TFA. The Fine Article.

Yeah, though in this case, it fit in well with the fact that my relative had recently heard the "There's no 'F' in broccoli" dad-joke:

  Customer: "I'd like a pound of broccoli, please."
  Grocer: "I'm out of broccoli."
  ... repeat 1 or two times
  Grocer: "How do you spell broccoli?"
  Customer: "B-R-O-C-C-O-L-I."
  Grocer: "You left out the 'F'."
  Customer: "There's no 'F' in broccoli!"
  Grocer: "That's what I'm trying to tell you!"

My apologies for any annoyance this joke has caused.

if you liked that, here's a good delivery of a variant of that joke by Harrison Ford: https://youtu.be/TRHWvVBxWCw?t=47

big friendly telescope?

Is this a possible solution? Gravitational lense telescope?

https://youtu.be/NQFqDKRAROI?feature=shared

ELT Pro Max

"This is the best telescope we've ever made, and we think you're gonna love it!"

If only telescopes were being built with significant improvements on a yearly basis. Instead, we have words like decadal project which indicates just how slowly they are brought about.

Complain to your congressperson!

Our 8 meter mirror is essentially the same as others 16 meter mirrors.

I used to work in the telescope world. Our organization acquired another organization that was working on NGAT: Next Generation Astronomical Telescope. At the time, we were also working on newer telescope models, and I joked about what we would name those…

I guess astronomers, like programmers, are just bad at naming things.

I actually really like names in the astronomy world. NGC 1832-456.382 really knock my socks off.

When they are not using boring names like that, the astro world does have some great names. It lets us know humans were involved in the naming. From the acronyms to the super superlative names, they have a bit of personality to them.

it was named OWL (overwhelmingly large telescope) when the project was to have a 100m diameter telescope. so I think there are still some years before we run out of words :)

Ah, see that's when we start swapping the second and third terms for things that imply even larger sizes. And then we can even go up to the inconceivably colossal quettascope.

we will have to move from real names based on conceptual understanding into the theoretical.

'this thing is giant (you wont believe what happens next)'

'nobody expected it to be this big (you have to see it)'

'mr beast trapped in HERE for 8 weeks (cant plant any trees)'

The ‘you won’t believe how big the next telescope is’ telescope. Seriously though, I think meta materials could end up creating a new field of optical telescopic lenses over the next few decades.

Maybe taking a clue from software. Let's call it "Large Telescope '95" (because let's face it, if it's built they will have been planning it from back then at least)

Infinitely Large Telescope would be larger than the Inconceivably Large Telescope.

Perhaps ISO could create a standardized list of “large” adjectives. Whenever a new telescope is built, it takes over the appropriate adjective and the existing ones are moved down accordingly. The one that gets bumped off the list gets turned into an aviary (after removing the mirror of course).

Edit: come to think of it, mirrors are probably safe right? The birds will stop to avoid flying into the other bird.

> I posit 'Inconceivably Large Telescope' to be the maximum.

No, we can't stop just yet as they are – conceivably – other models that will eventually surpass the «Inconceivably Large Telescope»:

– «Penultimately Inconceivably Large Telescope»

– «Antepenultimately Inconceivably Large Telescope»

– «Preantepenultimately Inconceivably Large Telescope».

A strings of further upgrades is also likely as a series of «Inconceivably Ultra Large» and «Pre/ante/penultimately Inconceivably Ultra Large» telescopes.

This is why I really hate it when people pick dumb names like this, which seem to assume that all progress will completely stop after they finish building this thing.

Look at Windows NT, for example: NT stands for "new technology". Well it obviously isn't new any more.

Some adjectives stack, like "terribly".

Though maybe there's some kind of strong enough diminishing effect on emphasis value such that any number of "terribly"s still has bounded effect XD