This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American
What a reddit find! Physics student Tim Blais has begun an odyssey of creating harmonically enjoyable science-packed song videos! On his Facebook page, he describes it as "An educational and utterly nerdy online video project." I'm all for that!
On his about page, we read: "A Capella Science is an online video project by Tim Blais, a physics master's student and lifelong harmony junkie. After years of tension between his creative and academic side, Tim had a sudden realization of how these two aspects of himself could work together for awesome. Drawing inspiration from Weird Al, Bill Nye, Mike Tompkins and Vi Hart he created A Capella Science, which may be the single most comprehensively nerdy endeavour ever conceived. Tim's science-parody creations are 100% originally recorded and made out of unaltered sounds from his mouth, throat and vocal cords.
Tim has no idea whether this will take off, but knows he will love every minute of it."
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His debut is a parody of Adele's song, Rolling in the Deep called Rolling in the Higgs. Take a look (and listen). There is some sound science in there!
There's a collider under Geneva
Reaching new energies that we've never achieved before
Finally we can see with this machine
A brand new data peak at 125 GeV
See how gluons and vector bosons fuse
Muons and gamma rays emerge from something new
There's a collider under Geneva
Making one particle that we've never seen before
The complex scalar
Elusive boson
Escaped detection by the LEP and Tevatron
The complex scalar
What is its purpose?
It's got me thinking
Chorus:
We could have had a model (Particle breakthrough, at the LHC)
Without a scalar field (5-sigma result, could it be the Higgs)
But symmetry requires no mass (Particle breakthrough, at the LHC)
So we break it, with the Higgs (5-sigma result, could it be the Higgs)
Baby I have a theory to be told
The standard model used to discover our quantum world
SU(3), U(1), SU(2)'s our gauge
Make a transform and the equations shouldn't change
The particles then must all be massless
Cause mass terms vary under gauge transformation
The one solution is spontaneous
Symmetry breaking
Roll your field to minimum potential
Break your SU(2) down to massless modes
Into mass terms of gauge bosons they go
Fermions sink in like skiers into snow
Tracks available for download at
http://www.cdbaby.com/Artist/ACapellaScience
I look forward to more from Tim in the future!