The Large Hadron Collider, better known by its English acronym LHC, is without a doubt one of the most important scientific developments of this century. After several stellar moments, including the discovery of the Higgs boson, the collider entered an optimization phase that lasted more than two years, and during that period, its leaders took advantage of the pause to film never-before-seen 360-degree videos. Today we present the first two.
Gone are the rumors, speculations, and fears of supposed spontaneous black holes capable of devouring the Earth. The Large Hadron Collider works perfectly, and its science is excellent. One hundred countries, ten thousand scientists and engineers, hundreds of laboratories, multiple universities... the list goes on. I am convinced that the scientific community will manage to develop a larger and more powerful successor; however, the 27-kilometer super-cannon still has a lot of work to do. Now, its specifications cannot remain “stagnant,” and that demands a series of complex upgrades. The first of them lasted just over two years, between February 2013 and April 2015. The work is slow and extraordinarily precise, but that did not prevent the people at CERN from creating a couple of videos about the interior of the collider.
The first one shows us the CMS experiment, while the second focuses on tasks at ATLAS. Both were published last week, although the descriptions confirm that the content was captured in 2013. Obviously the videos are in 360 degrees, but unlike other shorts that use static cameras, the person in charge of the lens in the ATLAS experiment is moving, which adds a very interesting additional perspective. As always, the ideal in these cases is to play the content at 4K resolution, because even at 1080p many details are already lost.
Honestly, I don't know if CERN has more videos about the collider prepared, but I would like it to be so. After all, it is one of the great beacons that the scientific world has today. Visiting it in person is almost impossible for most, therefore, we would like to have the first alternative.
