Higgs boson gets set to music
Scientists generate a musical picture of so-called "God particle" by attaching musical notes to each data point.
You may not be able to see the Higgs boson but now you can hear it.
Thanks to the labors of a team of researchers who attached musical notes to data that scientists believe correspond to the Higgs, the "sonification" of data points from the Atlas project at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland now lets listeners hear a melody with a distinctly Latin beat.
The team was comprised of Domenico Vicinanza, a researcher at Dante, Mariapaola Sorrentino of the ASTRA Project, and Giuseppe La Rocca of Catania's INFN.
Click here to listen to the Higgs.
Last week scientists, working under the auspices of CERN announced that they had found evidence suggesting the existence of the elusive particle. The Higgs is the final undiscovered particle predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics.
"As soon as the announcement was made, we begun working on the sonification of the experimental data," Domenico Vicinanza, product manager at Dante (Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe), at Cambridge in the U.K. told Discovery News.
"Sonification worked by attaching a musical note to each data. So, when you hear the resulting melody you really are hearing the data," Vicinanza added. "In this way any regularity in the scientific data can be naturally mapped to the melody: if the data are periodic (they are marked by a repeated cycle) the sonification will be a music melody which will have the same periodicity and regularity."
