CERN is an ambitious project which is about to come to completion. At least as far as the engineering is concerned. Data analysis will be ongoing and will perhaps be the most difficult because of the vast amounts of data which will need to be analyzed. There is so much data that the scientists at CERN created a filter to eliminate unnecessary data. Data which passes these filters will be further analyzed. My concern with this approach is that the projects intended purpose is both verification of existing theories and also discovery. These filters were put in place based on our current knowledge and thereby eliminated the unexpected and hampered the potential for discovery. Is anyone else concerned about CERN's data filter approach?

From what I've seen, the data management approach relies more on parallel processing than filtering... so much that the distributed processing architecture used to order the data is a major advance itself (approx. a Petabyte generated a year!) . I'll take the bar bet that they will be wringing papers from the data for decades as data mining tools get more sophisticated.

I can't wait to see what comes out of this thing (literally). Not only verifying and filling in the blanks (finally) of the redoubtable but frankly "fugly" Standard Model, but shedding light (bad pun) on the nature of dark matter, and maybe even glimpses of the hypothesized higher dimensions of string theory. But like much of science, the real discoveries may be the answers to questions we weren't even smart enough to ask. Hot!