Either it is so boring at the Large Hadron Collider that its employees and related workers spend their time forming choirs, or it is so exciting that everyone just has to sing about it. (Probably both.)
The CERN Choir has just released “The Particle Physics Song.” A revue number by Flanders and Swann lyrically reworked by Danuta Orlowska to describe the Large Hadron Collider.
That’s not the only time this country-spanning particle collider has inspired people to song, though.
The LHC was formerly immortalized (as much as one of the largest engineering projects in the history of mankind can be) in a rap by Kate McAlpine:
LHCsound took it all a step further and sonified the colliding particles themselves, taking their mathematical properties and mapping them into music. They explain it here:
To “hear” the data we can map physical properties (The Data) to audible properties (The Sound) in pretty much any way we choose. For a physicist, an obvious way to do this might be to map speed to pitch. I think this is obvious for a physicist because both of these things are measured “per second” (pitch or frequency is measured in Hertz, which means vibrations per second). But we don’t have to do the obvious, we can map any physical property to any audible property.
The full explanation is at the above link and definitely worth reading.
With the Large Hadron Collider, they’re bringing sound to the theorized “God” particle, the Higgs Boson. Ever wanted to hear what “God” might sound like?
