Daniel Whiteson - CERN, Dark Matter, and the Aliens Next Door | Basement Trailer

TL;DR

Particle physicist Daniel Whiteson discusses CERN's Large Hadron Collider, dark matter research, and how smartphones could become a global cosmic ray detector network.

Key Points

• 1.CERN processes an almost incomprehensible volume of data. Every 24 nanoseconds, 100 million channels of collision data are read out, generating petabytes daily — so much that most must be discarded, raising the risk of accidentally throwing away a Nobel Prize-worthy discovery.
• 2.Smartphones can function as cosmic ray detectors. Their CMOS camera chips use the same silicon technology as LHC detectors; a network of 100 million to 1 billion phones could detect muons and map cosmic ray origins across the sky in unprecedented ways.
• 3.Basic research investment is Whiteson's core philosophical argument. He contends that a $100 billion collider could reveal universe secrets, and that advancing fundamental knowledge — including about dark matter — reduces human conflict and is the best investment society can make.