By

Jeanna Bryner /

Livescience.com/ July 11, 2012, 2:27 PM

Hear the Higgs boson: "god particle" set to music

Researchers transformed data collected by the Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS experiment into musical notes, with music about 3.5 seconds into the score representing data for the possible Higgs boson particle.

Researchers transformed data collected by the Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS experiment into musical notes, with music about 3.5 seconds into the score representing data for the possible Higgs boson particle. / livescience.com

(LiveScience) Atom-smashing physicists have just turned data for a newly discovered particle, likely the Higgs boson, which is thought to give all other particles their mass, into music.

What does the possible Higgs boson sound like? The music created from the particle's data is beautiful, with one version having a marimba feel. And now, you can listen for yourself.

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 evidence came from two experiments at LHC, called ATLAS and CMS.

The researchers used so-called data sonification to transform data collected by the ATLAS experiment (one of the two experiments, CMS is the other, that found evidence for the likely Higgs particle) into sound. Essentially, they used a graph showing the ATLAS 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. [Gallery: Search for the Higgs Boson]

Vicinanza and colleagues created two versions of the "Higgs score," one a piano solo and the other a piano with added bass, percussion, marimba and xylophone. The spike in data around 126 gigaelectron volts (where one GeV is about the mass of a proton), the telltale sign of Higgs, can be heard about 3.5 seconds into these recordings.

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, who is a network engineer at DANTE, which is part of the high-speed pan-European research and education network called G?ANT.

Also, Vicinanza added, using different algorithms for turning data into sound, researchers may be able to detect interesting phenomena just by listening to their data.

Vicinanza and two collaborators, Mariapaola Sorrentino and Giuseppe La Rocca, relied on G?ANT to convert the data into sound.

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HolisticDNA says:
Higgs Boson / "God Particle" -2012 Science validates a 150+ year old discovery ..................Infinite Intelligence....Steve Meyer / New Thought Movement / HolisticDNA



The Sixth Sense Activation Sequence - GROUNDBREAKING New Book in 2012!



"New Thought promotes the ideas that "Infinite Intelligence" or "God" is ubiquitous, spirit is the totality of real things, true human selfhood is divine, divine thought is a force for good, sickness originates in the mind, and "right thinking" has a healing effect..." Wikipedia
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ktpario says:
Y'know, music means different things to different people. One thing is certain, civilization has been moving away from having the ability to craft. Now, unless there is A.I. nobody is satisfied. the problem is that "art" crafted by A.I. is crap. Unfortunately, we have been into this for several generations. Children have been brought up by other idiot children who have grown up without the ability to "craft". If we look at this through evolutionary eyes, we begin to see the decline and decay of what was once perceived as high art. We are already at the end. Now, it's just purgatory.
How I wish that the concept of art and science never came to be. What a confusing bunch of nonsense. Art is nature in it's inexplicable state. Science is the attempt to explain everything. Who freaking cares?
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