A few weeks ago we passed along news of a lawsuit challenging the powering up of the Large Hadron Collider- a mega-particle accelerator in Switzerland designed to winkle out the shy Hobbs boson, thought to give matter its mass.
Now comes a truly fascinating piece in The Times about some of the consequences of creating such a device. CERN scientists- of whom Tim Berners-Lee was one, inventing the Internet- figured out the LHC (besides creating a potential black hole that will swallow up the universe, the litigants in Hawaii say, but NYT is skeptical) will spin off so much data (something like 56m CDs worth, a stack 40 miles high) that trying to process it will crash the Internet.
So the lads at CERN have created a new "grid" system to handle the LHC data, a network so fast, the paper says, it can transmit the entire Rolling Stones recorded catalog from Britain to Japan in two seconds.
Speaking of the (admittedly remote) possibility of creating a black hole when the LHC is cranked up, it looks like the CERN scientists have a mordant sense of humor. Launch day- when both the LHC and grid start- they call it "red button day."
No comments:
Post a Comment