Apparently this has been around for a while, but I didn’t find out about it until today. It’s a rap explanation of what the Large Hadron Collider’s doing at CERN.
After you’ve watched it, you can read the text again here.
See it in Portuguese here.
Or in Spanish here.
There are more physics rap videos by the multi-talented Kate McAlpine here.
A Bad Guide 
My. A confluence of blogs!
Let’s have some biology thrown into the mix (by a gentleman named Oort Kuiper – very impressive).
“a gentleman named Oort Kuiper” REALLY? Does he wear a cloudy belt? 8^D
Thank you, AJP and Sili!
Stuart, very nice to see you!
I almost understood it…
Almost is close enough, at least until they discover something. But see above, Julia; there’s one in Spanish as well.
…and a popular explanation on what it was doing in late 2008…
I had missed that, Studiolum. Thanks.
It’s mildly surprising that I’ve not seen one of those Hitler-parody youtubes about the LHC’s fragile health.
There seem to be a couple, but they aren’t very good.
I read somewhere that the layout of the LHC had to be aligned closer than one-tenth of a millimetre over its 27 km length and that the pressure of the electromagnet is equivalent to all four jets of a 747, going at full blast, every sq. metre. Even I don’t normally build to those tolerances (actually, stuff I build at home I like to lay out by eye).
One-tenth of a mm is 100 microns – which is easy-peasy, unless (I plead ignorance) thermal expansion/contraction gives you problems.
Actually, I suppose that a tunnel doesn’t have curvature-of-the-earth problems? This is making me wonder whether the engineering of the LHC might be more interesting than the Physics Fairy Tales that are used to justify it. Of course, if it ever does work perhaps they’ll turn out not to be fairy tales.
Well, as I say, I couldn’t do 100 microns over 27 km by eyeballing it, certainly not without my glasses on.
I hadn’t thought of it, but maybe it does need curvature-of-the-earth adjustment. A 27 km long doughnut that’s under the surface but parallel to the curvature of the earth is longer than 27 km at the surface. And (depending on the depth) I bet it’s by more than ±100 microns. I know the towers of the Verrazano Narrows suspension bridge are 1 5/8″ further apart at the top than the bottom and its centre span is under a mile, but the towers are very high.
You are all making me crazy – I desperately want to see this, but my slow-loading viewing is restricted – maybe on Wednesday. I’m holding my breath. (I did hear a radio Dr Who/Captain Jack thang about the LHC which I thought was great fun. I can hardly wait until Wednesday. (By which time y’all’ll’ve moved on…
If you can see things on youtube, try googling it direct there. Actually, the best place to see them is really on Kate McAlpine’s site here.
I know even less about particle physics than I do about language, but having followed reports and articles on the LHC for several years now, I wonder if someone could explain to me why so many of the posts above dismiss it as a near-total failure? Surely getting to 3.5 TeV is hardly a laughable failure of design or engineering? The fact that modifications need to be made to get it up to to the target of 7 TeV does not seem to warrant the (barely) implicit scorn which seems to be dripping from many posts above. As a pieriansipist, I find the LHC remarkable and am happy to celebrate what its accomplishments to date represent in terms of human ingenuity and creativity. I am quite ready to have this apparently naive and ill-informed viewpoint corrected by the wiser and more cynical commenters above.
I agree, Stuart. I knew lots of those physicists when I lived in Hamburg (they had a collider there called DESY) and they were the nicest people you could ever meet, very smart and well-read. Just the kind of people I would expect to make a rap video about the LHC.
And of course, Sir Tim invented the WWW while he was working at CERN. He shares my birthday,
I visitied the LHC last year with a school physics group, and as dearime said, I found the engineering as interesting as the physics – or rather, just as astonishing. The tolerances involved are mind-blowing. The individual ring sections are 15 metres long by two metres with a 2cm curve over the length (forgive me if the figures aren’t accurate) with dozens of smaller tubes running through them.
I never thought of the curvature of the earth thing. I’ll try a question to the CERN people on it.
For a great physics rap, try the Geiger-Muller Groove by girls from Sydenham High School in London. It won a nationwide school science film award – and it’s a hoot.
Try and get “tappa,tappa, tappa” out of your head after you’ve watched it !
Thanks, that is great. I wonder if this is a useful tool for learning. When I was at school we used mnemonics, a device also used by medical students to jamb large quantities of bland-seeming information into the brain.
Well, the girls were so intent on getting the physics right that they were happy to not get the rap rhythms right, so there was some learning experience.
By the way, a news report on 16 March said that the LHC would be switched off for a year, in two year’s time, because of fears that it could break apart. It will only be able to run on half energy before the shut-down.
Its full operating capacity will not be achieved until at least 2013. The 2008 fault which caused damage because helium was not vented fast enough cost €27m to fix but CERN engineers found that further work was needed before the machine could be run up to full energy.
“Some of the copper stabilisers are not up to the quality needed to go to the full energy level,” said Steve Myers, director of accelerators and technology at Cern. As a compromise to the particle physicists eager to begin work, the CERN authorities decided to run the machine on half energy for the next two years.
Within the next few weeks, each beam of the LHC is scheduled to run at a lower power and when they collide the results are expected to be high enough to produce findings that could open new avenues, such as the possible discovery of supersymmetry — subatomic particles thought to be created at the beginning of the universe but have never been seen.
At these energy levels it might also be possible to find the elusive Higgs boson, or “God particle”, which could explain why matter has mass and hence lead to a greater understanding of the force of gravity, which operates over the vast distances of space.