Big Bang Machine
The new CERN nuclear accelerator is almost ready to turn on. In one year it will produce enough data to fill a 20 km high tall stack of CR-Rs. One CD-R is about 1.2mm thick. That is about 16,666,666.66 CD-Rs (or about 2,519,379.845 DVD-Rs). We’re gonna fuckin’ figure out this universe in no time! Just think about all that data!
I learned here that in 2006 there was enough digital data on the planet to fill 12 separate stacks of novels, each 93 million miles tall (to the Sun), and by 2010 12 stacks from the Sun to Pluto and back.
I can’t find any website where I can convert novels (in bytes) into CD-Rs, so I don’t exactly know how to compare these figures.
In this post from 2004, this man says that the Internet has less than half of 460 terabytes.
Unless my calculations are all fucked up, that 16,666,666.67 CD-Rs is about 10,579 terabytes.
That makes the data from one year of CERN use to come out to about 46 internets (2004-internets).
In this post from 2005, the Internet is 5 million terabytes. In this article from sometime in 2008, it says the CEO of Google said that the Internet is 500 million terabytes big.
That comes out to 47,263 years of CERN data.
The bottom line: The Universe better get a whole lot more interesting REALLY fucking fast if it is going to compete with the Internet.
February 26th, 2009 at 10:31 pm
I saw that the big bang machine was almost up and running a while back, and this being fuckphilosophy.com and all (great job, by the way, on snatching up that domain name bright and early) I thought I’d mention the issues I was faced with, just in case you could help…
The idea is for the machine to create controlled physical conditions similar to the moment (or moments) at which the big bang occurred… thats what i gather anyhow… all this so that we can study the building blocks of reality in something similar to those very first and actual conditions, to see, as it were, just how the patterns, and movements of the physics of our known universe unfolded into what they are is today… I think its a wonderful idea, and creative and expensive to boot, all up my alley… but I am bothered by this: Wasn’t an integral part of those first conditions the condition that we “banged” into these conditions, into something from some lack of matter and substrate, at least matter and substrate as we know it in the terms of our universe? It seems that would be the most important condition to recreate, the lack of matter, if the “bang” was gonna really have the same characteristics of the other real “bang”… I’m just not so sure that its possible, since at any moment, if you begin attempting to recreate conditions in which no matter exists, (again, matter as we know it in our current conditions) then if you succeed, you’ll have something to point back to immediately, something that proves you didn’t do anything at all, namely the matter that was involved when you attempted to create those conditions… you know the machine itself, or the scientists, or even your own mind assuming of course, that it is a part of a body if not entirely and only a body, and therefore definitely also some sort of matter… Its a simple RAA right… if you succeed in creating a condition in which no matter exists, but you are in our universe, the universe being something in which it is very hard if not completely impossible to get anything done without manipulating some form of matter, you have both matter and no matter at all in the same maximal set, which is impossible, therefore you didn’t succeed… I don’t know, maybe I’m missing something about the project… seems entirely possible, and i really like the idea of a big bang machine, thats what sucks… i mean besides philosophy…
-Mildred