The world’s largest science experiment has paved the way for the UK to develop the next generation of internet search engine.
Two high tech start-up companies from Cambridge are utilising the massive global computer grid, designed to analyse the unprecedented amounts of data generated by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The companies – Imense and iLexIR – have created a joint venture – Camtology – to use their individual expertise and products together to search both text and images online.
Dr Liz Towns Andrews, director of knowledge exchange at STFC said: “This is an excellent example of what happens when the possible wider applications of new research and technologies are considered. In this case, the Grid, that addresses the computing challenges faced by physicists analysing the vast amounts of science data generated by the Large Hadron Collider, is also solving the problems faced by Imense and iLexIR.”
Both companies are using GridPP to test and enhance their software. Funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), GridPP was built to be able to handle and analyse the UK’s share of the petabytes (one petabyte is one quadrillion bytes) of data that will be generated by the LHC annually, requiring huge data storage and processing capabilities.
With the aim of becoming the ‘Google’ of image searching, Imense has developed a search engine that will make sense of the huge numbers of pictures on the World Wide Web. Rather than relying totally on text descriptions of images entered by hand, the software can literally look at a photo and recognise the colours, shapes, objects and scenes.
iLexIR, is focussing on natural language processing. Current search engines present pages of results in order of expected relevance to a query, based on key words typed in by the user, resulting in vast numbers of irrelevant pages being returned and some important results not being presented. The use of natural language can help with both interpreting the query and also with interpreting the pages with the potential answers.
The joint venture will now look at using both products together to search text and images, and has started work on bringing together their expertise into a demonstrator model.
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Zealous, jealous, Nobel Prize hungry Physicists are racing each other and stopping at nothing to try to find the supposed ‘Higgs Boso’(aka God) Particle, among others, and are risking nothing less than the annihilation of the Earth and all Life in endless experiments hoping to prove a theory when urgent tangible problems face the planet. The European Organization for Nuclear Research(CERN) new Large Hadron Collider(LHC) is the world’s most powerful atom smasher that will soon be firing groups of billions of heavy subatomic particles at each other at nearly the speed of light to create Miniature Big Bangs producing Micro Black Holes, Strangelets, AntiMatter and other potentially cataclysmic phenomena as described below.
Particle physicists have run out of ideas and are at a dead end forcing them to take reckless chances with more and more powerful and costly machines to create new and never-seen-before, unstable and unknown matter while Astrophysicists, on the other hand, are advancing science and knowledge on a daily basis making new discoveries in these same areas by observing the universe, not experimenting with it and with your life. Einstein used Astronomy to prove his landmark general theory of relativity that, ironically, decribes, among other things, the Black Holes which the LHC is designed to produce at the hoped for rate of one per second.
The LHC is a dangerous gamble as CERN physicist Alvaro De Rújula in the BBC LHC documentary, ‘The Six Billion Dollar Experiment’, incredibly admits quote, “Will we find the Higgs particle at the LHC? That, of course, is the question. And the answer is, science is what we do when we don’t know what we’re doing.” And CERN spokesmodel Brian Cox follows with this stunning quote, “the LHC is certainly, by far, the biggest jump into the unknown.”
The CERN-LHC website Mainpage itself states: “There are many theories as to what will result from these collisions,…” Again, this is because they truly don’t know what’s going to happen. They are experimenting with forces they don’t understand to obtain results they can’t comprehend. If you think like most people do that ‘They must know what they’re doing’ you could not be more wrong. Some people think similarly about medical Dr.s but consider this by way of comparison and example from JAMA: “A recent Institute of Medicine report quoted rates estimating that medical errors kill between 44,000 and 98,000 people a year in US hospitals.” The second part of the CERN quote reads “…but what’s for sure is that a brave new world of physics will emerge from the new accelerator,…” A molecularly changed or Black Hole consumed Lifeless World? The end of the quote reads “…as knowledge in particle physics goes on to describe the workings of the Universe.” These experiments to date have so far produced infinitely more questions than answers but there isn’t a particle physicist alive who wouldn’t gladly trade his life to glimpse the “God particle”, and sacrifice the rest of us with him. Reason and common sense will tell you that the risks far outweigh any potential(as CERN physicists themselves say) benefits.
This quote from National Geographic, “The hunt for the God particle”, exactly sums this “science” up: “If all goes right, matter will be transformed by the violent collisions into wads of energy, which will in turn condense back into various intriguing types of particles, some of them never seen before. That’s the essence of experimental particle physics: “You smash stuff together and see what other stuff comes out.”