Just what your iPod needs: a Fermilab rap video
April 7, 2010 | 8:50 am
Rock stars of physics, particle business
smash matter, anti-matter and witness quarks, bottom to top
they don’t stop
“Where the Higgs at?” Yo that’s their mark!
Go! Go! Go!
Is this another music video explaining how the Large Hadron Collider at CERN operates? Nope, this time the beats bump and rhymes resonate to pay tribute to the original big-time atom smasher: the Tevatron.
Wired magazine Nerdcore Hip Hop All-Star funky49 releases today the first music video about Fermilab and its star particle accelerator. Rather than just focusing on how the mammoth machine works, science communicator funky49 looks at how the Tevatron fits into the “big picture”: politics, national prominence and your pocketbook.
funky 49 films a rap video in front of the CDF detector at Fermilab.
Although the Tevatron got dethroned this year as the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator, a title it held for more than two decades, it remains the world’s highest-energy proton-antiproton collider. The Tevatron also remains firmly in the race against the LHC in Switzerland to find the Higgs boson, a.k.a. the God Particle.
And you can’t have a good East Coast-West Coast competition without rap theme songs, according to a press release by funky49:
Standing on the shoulders of a giant, CERN’s Large Hadron Rap with its near 5.7 million Youtube views, Fermilab battles back with its own rap song complete with music video!
“Particle Business” highlights the quest to discover how the universe evolved and the David and Goliath-like competition of discovery between the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, CERN in Europe, and Fermilab, outside of Chicago, IL.
Their goal, the Higgs boson, a fundamental particle thought to give matter mass, theorized but as yet unable to be measured.
“Particle Business” combines a phat hip-hop beat with lyrics about particle physics, limits on science funding, the competitive-collaboration that exists in science research and urging people watch television like Mr. Wizard’s World and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos instead of the entertainment of MTV.
“Particle Business” debuted in August 2009 sans video as part of a lecture on the use of rap music to teach and celebrate science and technology. symmetry magazine broke down the meaning behind the lyrics in its December 2009 issue.
The “Particle Business” video is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaG6umMkbxg. An mp3 and a sampled “Where the Higgs at” ring tone is available at http://funky49.com.
Tona Kunz
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5 Comments »
April 7th, 2010 at 2:09 pm
Fermilab’s search for the Higgs boson is definitely not ending now that the LHC has started. On the contrary, if the Higgs boson mass is at its most likely value, the Tevatron is expected to provide the most sensitive Higgs searches for at least the next 3 years. So we may one day answer “where the higgs at?” and we will definitely continue to say over the next few years “where the higgs is not at” …
April 8th, 2010 at 11:22 am
Personally, the old FNAL “Accelerating Science” video is my favorite. … hmmmm … where’s that link …
April 8th, 2010 at 11:29 am
ah, VMS has it’s own You Tube site: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SARsKlcDza8
January 14th, 2011 at 2:51 pm
Just what high-energy particle accelerators need, a regional east coast-west coast rivalry. One thing we can be sure of is that they’ll maintain a high level of civility. We hope!
August 18th, 2011 at 5:33 pm
I was waiting for a long line of well-known rappers to step out of the particle accelerator looking…dazed. Or were those particles that were zooming by what was left of them being turned into dust? Let’s see a follow-up video from the lab in Switzerland to see who can make a particle accelerator seem cool.