Most of what CERN does sounds like the rarefied heights of sci-fi, accessible only to physicists with badges and pocket protectors, or academics who use esoteric software — not to mere mortals like you and me. What even happens in an atom smasher? CERN is hunting answers to big questions like what dark matter is and why there’s so much of it, why the fundamental forces seem to merge into one at extreme temperatures, why gravity behaves as it does, and other big-topic questions that seem to have one foot firmly in the realm of philosophy.
The LHC has been generating huge amounts of data for release to the general public since its first successful run in 2010. Continuing this trend, CERN just put out another big chunk of data for public analysis, some 300TB of partially organized results from the LHC’s operations since 2014 (when they did their first big data dump). CERN hopes to engage the curiosity of physicists around the world, whether amateur, academic or professional, and get them learning about particle physics and doing hands-on data analysis from their experiments. Many of the LHC’s current experiments and projects have a crowd-sourced component, relying on distributed computing like folding@home or SETI@home do. There are several experimental collider datasets on the CERN open data site that anyone can download. The LHC@home springboard page provides an overview of the distributed computing projects the LHC is currently involved in, including the LHCb, ATLAS, and ALICE.
To read more, click here.