I watched a video today about the ATLAS particle detector. It showed how it was constructed and so on, step by step. As an aspiring engineer, the sheer complexity of this project and the multidisciplinary nature of it is incredible. Thinking about it, the design team would have to contain world-class physicists, mechanical and civil engineers. As far as the sheer complexity of this project, my impression is that it quite easily rivals the space program (although it is an awful lot cheaper). Man went to the moon with less computing power than you have in your mechanical wristwatch, but to give an idea of how much computing power CERN requires, have a look below, I’ll give one small statistic.

If all the data CERN will produce this year were put on CD, the pile would be 20km high. (~15,000,000 gigabites per year)

I think CERN press statements may be the summer release we should most look forward to.

ATLAS Videos:

• Episode 1: A New Hope
• Episode 2: The Particles Strike Back (Part 1)
• Episode 2: The Particles Strike Back (Part 2)

On thing that must be said is that the titles of these videos do not help to remove the impression that these scientists sitting in a cave for years of their lives to study physics are just a little white and nerdy.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 6:45 pm and is filed under Science, World Issues . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.