Science Hack Day main site

Science Hack Day, San Francisco

Contents 1 The LHC data hack 1.1 Useful and preparatory links 1.1.1 The physics 1.1.2 Data 1.1.3 Repository 1.1.4 Tools 1.1.5 Web page for the hack

The LHC data hack

All the ideas for SHD11

One of the experiments from the Large Hadron Collider, the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment), has released a small amount of the data for educational purposes. However, it is hard to access and even more difficult to understand. Can we hack a better interface to these data? Can we create a website to allow others to use these data for education or art? Or can we do real SCIENCE with these data (my super-high-aiming goal!)???? I'll bring the data and explain what is in these datasets and some simple tools to interface with these data. Looking for hackers, coders, educators, artists and definitely designers, to figure out if this can be done.

Useful and preparatory links

Here's some preliminary links which should help you come up to speed on the goals and possibilities for this hack!

The physics

• The data come from the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the LHC.
  • An excellent browser-based event display for CMS. Use this to to ``see" the events.
  • Static .jpg of slice of the detector.
  • Interactive (Flash) animation of particles interacting in CMS.
  • A different static .gif of slice of the detector.
  • Other CMS outreach materials.
• Much of the physics analysis relies on a working knowledge of Four-vectors and how they relate energy, momentum, velocity and mass at speeds where Einstein's special theory of relativity becomes relevant.

Data

• Links to the publicly available data.
• A description of the .ig format used in some of these files.
  • Python API for .ig files
  • C++ API for .ig files.
• The .ig files are essentially zipped JSON files.

Repository

• I've created a repository for us to use for the weekend hack at github.

Tools

• I'll upload to the repository some hello-world-esque coding examples on how to display and analyze the data using Python and matplotlib. I don't know that this will be the endgame for analysis, but it's a jumping-off point.
• If we're aiming for web-based visuals, processing.js and it's parent project processing may be a good place to start.

Web page for the hack

I'm hosting my site at Bluehost which will let us host a site we write, or use one of their installed versions of a bunch of webby tools (Wordpress, MediaWiki, Drupal, etc.) from SimpleScripts. I don't know this part of the hack well at all, so I'm very much looking forward to designers to get this part up and running.