People have always been afraid of things they don’t understand. They’ve made many dire predictions of doom and gloom. Thankfully, most of those turn out to be wrong. Hopefully that will be the case with the Large Hadron Collider.
When the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) begins smashing protons together this fall inside its 17-mile- (27-kilometer-) circumference underground particle racetrack near Geneva, Switzerland, it will usher in a new era not only of physics but also of computing.
Before the year is out, the LHC is projected to begin pumping out a tsunami of raw data equivalent to one DVD (five gigabytes) every five seconds. Its annual output of 15 petabytes (15 million gigabytes) will soon dwarf that of any other scientific experiment in history.
The challenge is making that data accessible to a scientist anywhere in the world at the execution of a few commands on her laptop. The solution is a global computer network called the LHC Computing Grid, and with any luck, it may be giving us a glimpse of the Internet of the future.
On September 10, 2008 we’ll find out whether the latest end of the word predictions are right. I’m expecting a very large explosion – of knowledge about the nature of matter.