Friday, September 28, 2012

Particle Man, Particle Man...

So what's the big deal about scientists claiming that they think they've found the Higgs boson particle? It was the missing piece of the Standard Model of physics, and now that it's been (hopefully) found, it means that our general understanding of how the universe works is correct.  So that's pretty awesome. Let's celebrate by listening to music made by taking the mathematics of it all and assigning each number a musical value. The result is a very peppy tune for piano, bass, marimba, percussion, and xylophone sounds.

I find it kind of hard to believe that a sub-atomic particle sounds like a lounge mambo, but, hey, I'm no physicist. (And if sub-atomic particles really do sound like lounge mambos, well then the universe is far more wonderful than I ever imagined.) It's not very long - only about 2-and-a-half minutes - but the boson is a pretty small particle.

Domenico Vicinanza: Higgs Boson Sonification

This is not the first time we've featured music from the CERN/Large Hadron Collider posse. Four years ago we wrote about the "Large Hadron Rap," and back in '06 we covered the first band on the web. Brooklyn? Austin? Feh!  The CERN scene is where it's happenin', baby.

(This is still the only music blog with a 'science' category, right?)

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