Finally, 20 years of hard work of Physicists and Nuclear Scientiests from all over the world will see the light of the day at the CERN (in English, it translates to European Organization for Nuclear Research). They have come up with this mother of all accelerators called the LHC or in their terms the Large Hadron Collider to conduct the mother of all experiments. Not that I am a theoretical Physicist or even vaguely connected to anything nuclear (or nukular as some like to call it) but then I put my finger into everything that’s not my business. What the heck! So long as nobody’s complaining, I wouldn’t worry too much.
So they end up building this large circular tube like gizmo called the accelerator which has a few kilometers radius and spans across two countries (France and Switzerland). And now on September 10, 2008 they are going to conduct the first of a series of experiments to discover what happened at the Big Bang (or the creation of the universe). By “they” I mean a bunch of bright Physicists from all over the world and mainly from Europe. Sorry, I tend to be vague sometimes. I am sure that this LHC is one heck of a boy’s toy. Nice. Let’s hope they come up with some great results too that would end up re-writing our Physics textbooks. Its darned boring to read the same stuff over and over again.
What also interests me is the data they are going to come up with and how they are going to sift through it. Seems one single experiment will end up generating a lot of data. And then some. By a lot, I don’t mean that it will fill a few pages of a Lab Book or a few Lab Books but enough to fill around 100,000 DVDs. So the Scientists are going to use “Grid Computing” or Distributed computing to analyse this data. I first heard of this at a conference last year where HP showcased their servers some of which are installed at CERN. Once the experiment is completed, the data will be distributed across different computers across the world and each one will analyze a fragment of this data and send it back to the central computer at CERN. I can’t imagine how they can come up with such kind of ideas. But it does sound real cool. CERN has been nice enough to put much of this stuff on their website (http://cern.ch). So for some days to come, I am going to keenly follow what’s gonna happen. So while I am still trying to figure out why the sky is blue, Scientists have gone ahead figuring out how the sky and earth were created or what elements created them. Needless to say, we live in interesting times.
So they end up building this large circular tube like gizmo called the accelerator which has a few kilometers radius and spans across two countries (France and Switzerland). And now on September 10, 2008 they are going to conduct the first of a series of experiments to discover what happened at the Big Bang (or the creation of the universe). By “they” I mean a bunch of bright Physicists from all over the world and mainly from Europe. Sorry, I tend to be vague sometimes. I am sure that this LHC is one heck of a boy’s toy. Nice. Let’s hope they come up with some great results too that would end up re-writing our Physics textbooks. Its darned boring to read the same stuff over and over again.
What also interests me is the data they are going to come up with and how they are going to sift through it. Seems one single experiment will end up generating a lot of data. And then some. By a lot, I don’t mean that it will fill a few pages of a Lab Book or a few Lab Books but enough to fill around 100,000 DVDs. So the Scientists are going to use “Grid Computing” or Distributed computing to analyse this data. I first heard of this at a conference last year where HP showcased their servers some of which are installed at CERN. Once the experiment is completed, the data will be distributed across different computers across the world and each one will analyze a fragment of this data and send it back to the central computer at CERN. I can’t imagine how they can come up with such kind of ideas. But it does sound real cool. CERN has been nice enough to put much of this stuff on their website (http://cern.ch). So for some days to come, I am going to keenly follow what’s gonna happen. So while I am still trying to figure out why the sky is blue, Scientists have gone ahead figuring out how the sky and earth were created or what elements created them. Needless to say, we live in interesting times.
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