CERN Releases 300TB of Large Hadron Collider Data Into Open Access (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, has released 300 terabytes of collider data to the public. "Once we've exhausted our exploration of the data, we see no reason not to make them available publicly," said Kati Lassila-Perini, a physicist who works on the Compact Muon Solenoid detector. "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," she said in a news release accompanying the data. Much of the data is from 2011, and much of it is from protons colliding at 7 TeV (teraelectronvolts). The 300 terabytes of data includes both raw data from the detectors and "derived" datasets. CERN is providing tools to work with the data which is handy.
I just can visualize a horde of crackpots using this data to fuel fringe theories
I heard from good authority that the LHC breached a planar dimension, and one of its red/white striped inhabitants escaped into the LHC data stream.
So now they're releasing the data into the public in the hopes that someone will find this wimpy alien lifeform data object (waldo)...
Before this, the largest collection of collision data was the Russian dash-cam footage on YouTube