Re:wow (Score 3, Informative)

>When did author lists get so long?

The author lists got so long when the experiments became too expensive and complicated for any one group to run by themselves. Because so many different groups contribute in many different ways (through construction, testing, writing specialized software, or analyzing results) they all have to be acknowledged.

I'm author #104 of #113 on a different paper (I went to a university very near the end of the alphabet), and it doesn't bother me at all that I have realtively few publications or that I'm one among so many authors. In this field, people realize the extreme difficulty of writing experimental papers in small groups. The only particle physics papers you will see these days with only a few authors are theoretical, and not experimental.