CERN made the news big time last week for the Higgs boson discovery, but what do those CERN folks do in their spare time?
Some of them make music. The CERN Music Club Web site lists 16 bands, the first of which was Les Horribles Cernettes, formed 22 years ago. This photo of the Cernettes was the first image published on the World Wide Web, which was developed at CERN.
In spite of their name, the Cernettes are not all that horible. They sing well and the lyrics are clever. Check out their song Collider:
If you like that, there is plenty more on their Web site and on YouTube. The Cernettes are going to disband after a July 21 concert that, I bet, will be posted on YouTube.
The Cernettes were the first CERN group to hit the Web, but they were not the biggest. That honor goes to Katherine McAlpine's Large Hadron Rap. LHR is the coolest science rap song ever. (Admittedly, that's not a wildly popular genre). It's been viewed 7,397,628 times.
One more -- if you worry about the mad scientists at CERN creating a black hole that sucks in The Earth, McAlpine's Black Hole Rap will calm you down:
I can't really understand the Higgs boson -- the "God particle" that is evidence of the Higgs field, which evokes mass in our universe. But the human side of the endeavor -- joy, song, humor, beauty and awe -- is tangible. Here are some examples:
Watch the joyful applause at yesterday's announcement of the discovery at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research:
Peter Higgs tears up at the announcement of a five standard deviation level of significance of the discovery:
Here is a PBS Nova interview/dramatization of Peter Higgs' trepidation at the time he advanced his theory. (The first paper he submitted was rejected):
(For reactions at the time of the announcement, check out the Guardian's live blog).
Large Hadron Rap (LHR), is perhaps the coolest science rap song ever:
LHR is not the first parody music from CERN. That honor belongs to Les Horribles Cernettes. They were funny and not all that horrible -- check out their song Collider. The Cernettes posed for the first inline image published on the World Wide Web:
Boston.com has assembled dramatic photographic images illustrating the scale and complexity of the CERN collider. Here is one of them:
Peter McCready has created a collection of naviagable, 3-D panoramic photographs of the collider. This is the "table of contents" page, and the images are spectacular:
Last, and, yes, perhaps least, we have the earlier siting of the Higgs bison:
dancewithshadows.com
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Update 4/14/2014
Last month researchers announced that a 10-meter telescope at the South Pole had detected gravitational waves in the cosmic microwave background, a discovery that supports the cosmic inflation theory of how the universe began. I cannot comprehend that, but one of principle investigators summed it up as a "smoking gun" in support of the Big Bang. While I can't follow their reasoning, I do appreciate the human side and magnitude of the quest. For that, check out this video of professor Andrei Linde -- one of the theoreticians behind it -- being told of the (5 standard deviation) result:
