Yesterday, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) made the first data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) available online for anyone who wishes to use it: The internet thus gained 300 terabytes of knowledge.
The data includes 100 TB of “data from proton collisions at 7 TeV, which is half of the data collected at the LHC by the CMS detector in 2011.”
The release of this data was added to another infodump in 2014, and can be accessed via the CERN Open Data Portal.
Some of the information made available to the public is raw data that has not been processed by CERN scientists, while some has already been processed to make it accessible for high school science classes.
CERN released raw data for a few practical reasons:
“Once we have exhausted the exploration of the data, we see no reason not to make it public. The benefits are many, such as inspiring high school students to train as the particle physicists of tomorrow,” said Kati Lassila-Perini, the CMS physicist responsible for managing the data.
The "opening" of information naturally also has practical scientific uses, as CERN reports that they already have cases of scientists confirming their results, or other scientists advancing their research in ways they had not initially foreseen.
