Lucy Orr recounts how, with her father wrestling with big data at CERN in search of the Higgs Boson, she has been able to witness the intersection of big data and video games since the 1970s

© 2020 Cern

I HAD an unconventional childhood, which involved attending the playgroup and international school at CERN, the fabled particle accelerator and research facility in Switzerland. My dad, Robert ‘Bob’ Orr, was CERN Fellow and Staff Physicist at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (1976-1981), so after-school work visits involved trying not to step in front of a particle beam while he pored over huge photographic negatives of particle collisions.

Big data solving the mysteries of the universe

CERN represents one of the prime examples of big data in practice: its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) generates a huge amount of data – around 30 petabytes (1,024 terabytes in a petabyte) of information a year. Its sensors record hundreds of millions of collisions between particles, some of which achieve speeds of 99.9 per cent of the speed of light as they are accelerated around the collider.