David McClain

Interesting article from: http://ow.ly/cbARU

Atom-smashing physicists have just turned data for a newly discovered particle, likely the Higgs boson, into music. On July 4, researchers at the world’s largest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), in Switzerland, announced they had seen a particle weighing roughly 125 to 126 times the mass of the proton that was consistent with the Higgs boson. The researchers used so-called data sonification to transform data collected by the experiment into sound. Essentially, they used a graph showing the data and turned the energies of collisions shown on that graph into musical notes. Each data point, or energy number for a collision, was always given the same musical note, with the melody changes following exactly the same profile (the ups and downs) of the scientific data.

 

“It offers the same qualitative and quantitative information contained in the graph, only translated into notes,” composer, physicist and engineer Domenico Vicinanza told LiveScience. The beats are not just music to the ears, as Vicinanza said; the melody could be useful for many reasons. “For example, it would allow a blind researcher to understand exactly where the Higgs boson peak is and how big the evidence is,” Vicinanza said. “At the same time, it could give a musician the opportunity to explore the fascinating world of the high-energy physics by playing its wonders,” added Vicinanza.