New LHC monitoring portal LIVE DATA

[Vanadium 50]

This is NOT disrespecting any of the fine and frankly awesome people at CERN.

Of course it is. It's showing utter contempt. You are arguing that they are sufficiently bad scientists that they will miss a major discovery, and sufficiently bad scientists that a bunch of amateurs would do a better job. Think about the football analogy - if you said that you've never played in the NFL, or even in college, but you could score ten touchdowns in one quarter against the Colts or the Saints, what do you think people's reactions would be?

Now imagine you making the same statement in the locker room of the Colts or Saints. Like Warren said, you will have a hard time attracting real scientists to your site if you treat them in such an exasperating manner.

I also note that there is a huge difference between "having ideas" and "discovering something in the data that the researchers missed".

There's another point that Redbelly could have mentioned. People can "rediscover" old wrong things. About once a month we have someone post here that they have a revolutionary new theory of gravity. Except that it's not true - it was first proposed in 1690.

If you want to discover something new, you need to learn what is already known. That means devoting the time to study it.

 

[arivero]

Perhaps the point is "contributing work". It should be some way to add amateur and undergraduate level work to the prof work. Of course it could imply a discovery coming from the amateur work, but it should be the same that a discovery done in the collisions collected during the night shift of researcher John Doe in Aleph... it should still be a discovery of Aleph@CERN, not a discovery of John Doe.

 

[daschaich]

... I believe that everyone should have fair access to data, then apply analysis tools suited for the job of finding experimentally predicted/unpredicted results...

To rephrase what Haelfix and Vanadium have been saying, there are no such "analysis tools" that can be applied out-of-the-box. Hundreds of scientists have already devoted years of their lives to performing LHC analyses, and will be devoting years more in the decades to come. There is no way an outsider can even begin to make sense of the data independently, even if it is "semi-processed" as Xymox suggested. Haelfix said it best:

There is literally zero chance that an amateur can spot something in the LHC data that the pros would miss.

Something that I think should be emphasized more than it has been so far is that the LHC experimental collaborations are not monolithic entities. I think this is being overlooked in comments like:

So I think having more people from outside the box look at LHC science might well have advantages.

You know... maybe just like they need a million computer CPUs all working on the collision data to detect interesting events.. Maybe they need millions of people looking at the data to find interesting events as well...

...

Maybe the LHC should become completely open in order to have better quality results quicker :) Maybe having just a small group of people working on the science is not the best idea.

The collaborations are not "small groups of people", but include hordes of (often fiercely competing) scientists spanning the range from "conservatives" to iconoclasts, each promoting their favored searches and analyses. They're not going to overlook anything that anybody else could discover.

 

[ninar]

wow... i had never before acknowledged this fierce side of physicists. i like it.