The Large Hadron Collider.
LHC, the Large Hadron Collider, and the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing.
http://lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc/
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider
[quote] The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a particle accelerator and collider located at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland. [unquote]
http://lhcathome.cern.ch/
What drives a million people, with almost 1,500,000 computers, to search for stuff that might never be found? Click the boincsynergy link to find out where these people are, and what they are looking for.
http://www.boincsynergy.com/stats/index.php
So far, only about 33,000 of the people, and about 72,000 computers, are working on the LHC at Home project. But, starting in November 2007, the LHC might discover a new set of laws for physics particles.
What if the silly idea of endless free energy, which put some internet criminals in prison several years ago, turned out to be possible? Could scientists clean up the enormous mess of radioactive waste forever?
There might not be any new dictionary, nor one new word, however, the dreams of many people during the century of science, that science would help us to solve some of the mysteries of life, might happen.
What has CERN, the builder of LHC, done in the past? Scientists, working at CERN, invented the World Wide Web, won several Nobel Prizes, and have many notable achievements:
http://press.web.cern.ch/public/Content/Chapters/AboutCERN/Achievements/NobelPrizes/NobelPrizes-en.html
http://lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc/Golden_hadron_awards.htm
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/Content/Chapters/AboutCERN/Achievements/WorldWideWeb/WWW-en.html
Some of the more practical accomplishments might help us to see the value of particle research. There are about 17,000 particle accelerators in use, about half of them used in medicine, for imaging and therapy.
http://press.web.cern.ch/public/Content/Chapters/AboutCERN/ResearchUseful/Medicine/Medicine-en.html
Other BOINC projects include searching for Einstein’s gravitational waves, malaria control, climate prediction, and large-scale protein structure.
Perhaps the most published BOINC project is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. One of the SETI teams, which I belong to, has a motto, that the best proof for intelligent life is that they have not contacted us :)
Einstein at Home is a BOINC program using computer idle time to search for spinning neutron stars, called pulsars, using gravitational wave detectors. I think, no gravitational waves have ever been found.
http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/
My old computer spent its last days searching for the gravitational waves through Einstein at Home. If you decide to join any BOINC project, your computer should have a good cooling system for the CPU and hard drive.
One of the most exciting parts of the BOINC projects, for me, was the ability to join the message forums, and see details, or ask questions, about the projects. Many teams have their own forums just for fun.
The team I joined, The Final Front Ear, is by far, the wackiest group I have ever seen :)
http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/team_display.php?teamid=128
http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/teamintro/index.html
This is Graviton Ring. We all drink from the same fountain of wisdom.
Some of us, however, cannot hold our attention on anything humorless :)
