CERN releases 300TB of Large Hadron Collider data into open access

Cancel your plans for this weekend! CERN just dropped 300 terabytes of hot collider data on the world and you know you want to take a look. Kati Lassila-Perini, a physicist who works on the Compact Muon Solenoid (!) detector, gave a refreshingly straightforward explanation for this huge release. “Once we’ve exhausted our exploration of the data, we see no reason not to make them available publicly,” she said in a news release accompanying the data. “The benefits are numerous, from inspiring high school students to the training of the particle physicists of tomorrow. And personally, as CMS’s data preservation coordinator, this is a crucial part of ensuring the long-term availability of our research data.” Amazing that this perspective is not more widely held — though I suspect it is, by the scientists at least, if not the publishers and department heads who must think of the bottom line.

This is only the latest of several data dumps, but it’s also by far the largest. A more detailed explanation of the types of data and how they can be accessed is right here

cern data

source

amateur Physicists must be jizzing their pants


this makes me wonder if there are findings they will never publish, because they can claim theyve released it all to the public.

originally posted by: odzeandennz

this makes me wonder if there are findings they will never publish, because they can claim theyve released it all to the public.

Well, of course there are.

a reply to: odzeandennz

this makes me wonder if there are findings they will never publish, because they can claim theyve released it all to the public.

1) The time/space rift into the DOOM universe ? Where is Sarge and the BFG ?
2) The opening of the self-sustaining Black Holes ?
3) Getting in touch or being possessed by a Middle Eastern Goddess ?
4) Alien communication ?

Just a bunch of (meaningless to me ) nuclear weights , energy measures , lights , colors , etc. At 300 TB , no one can download....even I dont have that kinda HDD space.

im sure there a plenty of truth seekers out there with the HDD space and the knowledge on how to read the data, and then relay it back to the people, ( i hope ).... other countries that are not part of CERN like russia and china will have the data read in a day also no doubt just as standard procedure. and how are we supposed to know if there is any missing, i personally have been looking more into atoms and how they work, and when you start to study more into the physics of it, it is truly astounding, i like to think that we humans will one day evolve into a being that can manipulate atoms from a conscious level, imagine being able to make anything of matter change into something else of the same matter that is more desirable to us, of course if we were to ever evolve to that level, materialistic things wont matter! Sigh...

300TB of data, think of all the pr0n that will have to be deleted to store that sort of data

Probably that data is just a small snapshot of what they have and for most people that is too much data to download anyway and you'd probably need a rack full of high capacity drives just to hold it all and thats before you see the electricity bill.

These sort of dumps are great but the sort of person who can probably make a detailed understanding of the data is already there at CERN anyway.

a reply to: Maxatoria

300 tb isnt that much in todays terms, my #ty laptop holds 1tb

a reply to: Davg80

im sure there a plenty of truth seekers out there with the HDD space and the knowledge on how to read the data,

You do mean misread the data, because guaranteed you will see some type of conspiracy come from it.

a reply to: Davg80

But if you want to hold the data as it is due to you being paranoid you'll certainly need a good slab of the big iron to contain it and since you want to ensure the fact that the data has never been changed you'll need a nice raid array probably adding at least 20-30% on top of the storage requirements.

Storing 300tb safely isn't something generally for the home person.

originally posted by: tsurfer2000h
a reply to: Davg80

im sure there a plenty of truth seekers out there with the HDD space and the knowledge on how to read the data,

You do mean misread the data, because guaranteed you will see some type of conspiracy come from it.

thats more than guaranteed, its a formality.
i remember a bunch of threads which cropped up 'predicting ' an impeding doom if miniature blackhole conditions are recreated... but... of course predictions on ats are like opinions... which are like you know...

i cant wait for the condensed data at the next ted talk or some other confere.

a reply to: odzeandennz

Just got slapped on the wrist for reposting this in the science and tech area. It is really quite cool to see experiments doing this. Afterall these are government funded projects and such, the data should end up in the public domain after its initial analysis by the experts.

I didn't see the initial 27TB of data CMS released previously but when looking on the Open Data Portal at the getting started page, i was extremely pleased to see that the analysis tools are exactly the same as the students and post-docs on CMS would use to access and analyze the real data. To me that speaks of its authenticity that the release is as close to raw data as one can get. I am not sure what cleaning and calibration has been performed, but it is great to see a set of instructions on how to install ROOT and get started looking at the data, rather than the usual "Here is a visualization and thats all you get"

Someone could basically take this data and reporoduce a Masters, or PhD thesis set of plots and check that the analysis was performed correctly.

It also is wonderful because people who most often claim that no one knows what is going on at CERN, actually can (if they want to deny ignorance) look at the data themselves.