Why is there something rather than nothing? That's the kind of question the Large Hadron Collider in CERN is hopefully poised to answer. And what is the output of this beautiful 17-mile long, 6 billion dollar wabi-sabish proton smashing machine? Data. Great heaping torrents of Grand Canyon sized data. 15 million gigabytes every year. That's 1000 times the information printed in books every year. It's so much data 10,000 scientists will use a grid of 80,000+ computers, in 300 computer centers , in 50 different countries just to help make sense of it all.
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