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from the I-found-2-coins-and-a-boiled-sweet dept.
If you're not too busy this weekend, why not sit down on your sofa and try to find a Higgs Boson or dark matter ?
The idea's feasible because CERN yesterday released data generated by the the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS). “one of two large general-purpose particle physics detectors” at the Large Hadron Collider. CERN says the CMS' goal is “to investigate a wide range of physics, including properties of the recently discovered Higgs boson as well as searches for extra dimensions and particles that could make up dark matter.”
It's rather complex. CERN says “it takes CMS scientists working in groups and relying upon each others’ expertise many months or even years to perform a single analysis that must then be scrutinized by the whole collaboration before a scientific paper can be published.
The data is a little old: (recorded in 2010) http://opendata.cern.ch/collection/CMS-Derived-Datasets
The CMS team has prepared tools ( http://opendata.cern.ch/collection/CMS-Tools ) to help you with your exploration, plus a virtual machine ( http://opendata.cern.ch/record/250 ) in the notionally portable .OVA format (and recommends VirtualBox to run it).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 21 2014, @08:36PM
http://amultiverse.com/comic/2012/07/09/boson-buddies/ [amultiverse.com]
Never actually expected that one to be obligatory.