3 ms·

The brightly colored CMS detector reminds me of the colorful spiralling concentic circles of a mandlebrot zoom. We live in the matrix

• martinpw 8y ago
  Yeah, they are spectacular. And then you look at the green parts on the side and realize that thing is 4 stories high. As an aside, I like the understated way the description is written: The extraction of these events from the LHC data is challenging as there are many mundane type of events that can mimic them. Identifying these events requires measurements from all CMS subdetectors, which makes the reconstruction quite complex. I can only imagine what the value of "many" and the amount of effort behind "challenging"and "quite complex" really is.
  • chaos95 8y ago
    Also the definition of "mundane" - I'd guess there are several phenomena under that heading that are quite fascinating in their own right.
    • c12 8y ago
      What I find incredible is the drive that these scientists have; then again they get to work at what is in my opinion the most amazing scientific facility humanity has built to date on Earth. I'd choose looking over mundane data every day for that, regardless of how boring it was, if only to be in the shadow of giants.
    • tripzilch 8y ago
      A friend of mine, during his PHD defence on some theoretical physics topic that is way beyond me, once used the term "garden variety quantum(something)", to distinguish it from the new crazy theoretical dimensional weirdness he had been researching. (actually the phrasing was quite a bit funnier in Dutch: "huis- tuin- en keukenquantum")
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]