Your complaint that plans to build ever-grander particle accelerators collide with economic reality may hold for the time being (“Onwards and Upwards,” March 10, 2007), but it sounds kind of quaint in view of the dreams of the boldest among particle physicists, astrophysicists, and cosmologists. To your dismay, they dream of accelerators encircling entire celestial bodies, such as planetary satellites, entire stars, and even entire galaxies. The gravity and vacuum assisting such colossal machines would allow for ever-grander discoveries of how everything in the universe fits together, but also for energy generation surpassing anything achievable on earth, or even in the solar system. Onwards and upwards, as you rightly say. In spite of economic reality as we know it, too.