Years before the Large Hadron Collider found what maybe/possibly/probably is the Higgs boson "god particle", a dude named Ryushimitsu Xingjian built a tribute to it piece by piece in Second Life, and then made this stirring machinima above. When the god particle discovery news broke yesterday, I had to look it up and play it, because it captures the epic, world-changing power of the LHC... and, dammit, science in general. Watch, watch!
The SL version no longer exists in-world ("Took up too many prims!", Dr. Xingjian explains), but lives on in this machinima -- and in the memory of David Harris, a physicist who's editor of Symmetry Magazine from Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and Fermilab, who has seen the real thing up close, and told me this Second Life tribute came quite close to what it looks like:
"Not everything is scientifically accurate," Harris told me, "but I can tell you from having been in the ATLAS cavern while it was being built, that this does a very good job of the look and feel of the real detector." And now that it's really detected the fundamental particle that makes all things real, the virtual recreation seems even more awesome.
Lovely vid - thanks for posting.
Posted by: Hitomi Tiponi | Friday, July 06, 2012 at 04:47 AM
At one point we also had an accelerator in SL. https://vimeo.com/8543512
His video is way better than ours, but good memories all the same!
Posted by: Eric Hackathorn | Wednesday, July 11, 2012 at 11:47 AM