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A Capella Science-Rolling in the Higgs

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!

Joanne Manaster is a university level cell and molecular biology lecturer with an insatiable passion for science outreach to all ages. Enjoy her quirky videos at www.joannelovesscience.com, on twitter @sciencegoddess and on her Facebook page at JoanneLovesScience

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