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CERN's letting everyone look at its Large Hadron Collider data
Life can he hard for the armchair particle physicist, forever knowing that other people have their own Large Hadron Collider and you don't. Thankfully, the folks at CERN remember what it was like not to have an LHC of their own, which is why the agency is opening up its data for all of the world to poke at. The CERN Open Data Portal will release the full details of each experiment three years after it was conducted, enabling the professionals to get their fill before everyone else gets a turn. The first set to be made available is from the 2010 collisions, and presumably the data set from 2011 will be along in short order, too. In addition, the outfit has prepared simplified collections from the various arrays for educational use, complete with visualization tools that'll help students taking the International Masterclass in particle physics. Now, of course, all we need is for some rank amateur to casually glance at the reams of data and come up with a world-shattering discovery of their very own.
