Re: why not video record all experiments?
- From: Tom Roberts <tjroberts137@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 22:15:04 -0500
contemplate7@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
I've never heard this suggestion, but it just occured to me that it
would be nice if I could actually watch a movie of an experiment and
how it was conducted.
In a loose sense, we already do so, at least in high energy physics (and in most other fields of physics, too). But we don't record to conventional videotape, we record to computer media; we don't record images, we record the data directly related to our measurements.
And modern experiments do so at a prodigious rate: one
year at the LHC is expected to generate between 10 and 100
petabytes of data. A year-long video on YouTube, in contrast,
would be a mere 500 gigabytes or less -- many thousands of
times smaller. YouTube could probably handle that video if
they decided to (storing it is easy, serving it to thousands
of viewers is not, but this is not very far outside their
current capabilities); data management for the LHC is so
vastly much more difficult that YouTube could not hope to
handle it with their current methods.
A video of most HEP experiments would be exceedingly boring: the detector just sits there without moving or doing anything visible (except when something breaks), and the physicists just sit at terminals typing away and looking at plots (well, significant time is spent thinking (:-)). Occasionally some technician changes a gas bottle or performs other routine maintenance, but that is boring, too, and is really peripheral to the experiment itself. Most detectors take data far too rapidly for any conventional video to begin to capture (see above).
Tom Roberts
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