HiggsBoson

CERN particle physicist Piotr Traczyk (also known as Traq) recently did something incredible. He took the CERN discovery of the Higgs Boson (also known as The God Particle) and translated it into metal riffs! Then he filmed the video at CERN. Below you can find the video itself and Traq's description as provided by The Cylindrical Onion.


Last year I was part of the team that made a video for CERN’s 60th anniversary called “LHChamber music”. It was a performance of a piece composed by Domenico Vicinanza and performed by LHC physicists and engineers in the experimental caverns. The musical piece was composed based on a “sonification” of data from the four big LHC detectors, transforming data into musical notes using some relationship chosen by the composer, representing the data as sound instead of the plots and graphs we physicists are so used to. The data from the experiments were mapped to a major scale and arranged such that they could be all played simultaneously in harmony, as a metaphor of scientific collaboration.

Shortly after finishing work on that video I had the idea of doing something similar, just as a fun experiment for myself. I wanted to take some CMS data plots and make a short musical piece that would “play” the plots, minimising the input from the composer. I decided to take two plots from the Higgs discovery seminar of 4 July 2012: the Higgs-search mass plots in the gamma-gamma and 4-lepton channels. They both have about 20 bins in the histograms, so taking the first 16 bins and assigning each bin to a sixteenth note I could have a single bar of music representing each plot. Or two bars if I use eighth notes, and so on.

To learn more, you can read HERE.


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