Tuesday, April 14, 2015

For Those About to Rock (In a Thinly Disguised Attempt at World Domination)

You weren't mistaken.

You did hear a noise last week, a seemingly far off disturbance. The hairs on your arms stood on end, just a little. And you shuddered, though you didn't really know why.

On April 5, the Large Hadron Collider restarted after a two-year hibernation. The scientists/Illuminati at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) claim that the hiatus enabled them to upgrade the Collider's technology and refurbish the 27km (16.8 mile) tunnel. We should look no further than the obvious disconnect between the organization's name and its acronym for evidence that they remain up to no good.

Ostensibly, the next round of experiments conducted using the LHC seek to confirm the existence of dark matter, and its cousin, dark energy. (I don't know whether they are close cousins, or some sort of Greyjoy/Lannister thing. I fear we may find out, though.) The first experimental outcomes from this new round of experimentation have demonstrated a very different set of findings.

The LHC, friends, is trying to dominate us all through heavy metal. And I don't mean cadmium.



As reported by a CERN blog entitled The Cylindrical Onion (we see you, science satirists), a pair of researchers have translated the results from LHC tests seeking evidence of the Higgs Boson into musical notes. Scientist Piotr Tracyzk explains:

"The data (the points with error bars in the histogram) have low numbers of entries in the bins. Some bins are empty: an empty bin would correspond to a pause. A bin with X entries would correspond to a note X semitones above C# (I chose C# as the base note). I preferred to assign the notes of the chromatic scale (semitones) – and not, for example, a major scale – to give the data freedom to yield some crazy melodies. So the rhythm and the harmonic structure are also derived from the data. I figured that the resulting melody, if played low, could have been a guitar riff in a wacky heavy-metal song. A perfect match for the CMS guitar! So this was the guitar I used for the 4-lepton riff."

A wacky 4-lepton riff! I certainly don't need to tell you, an educated and worldly reader, what that implies.

It's coming for our kids. And it's bringing axe-wielding scientists.

10 comments:

zman said...

Looking through a glass onion perhaps.

Clarence said...

So much drama in LHC
It's kinda hard bein robbie r-o-double-b

Squeaky said...

I'm waiting on Run II to really get the full picture.

And the snow is finally melting at a rapid pace in the backyard. Our yard might be completely snow free by the weekend. I'm little disappointed it won't last till May 1st.

zman said...

I would like to have a job in which my sole responsibility is to write stuff like this:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/14/dining/field-guide-to-the-sandwich.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

Whitney said...

wodustudios.com at 7pm

Les Coole will be rocking it. Well, not really, but he will be spinning some tunes and being less cool.

Listen live.

TR said...

The TR Family Truckster Tour hit the Air & Space Museum in DC today. We saw a planetarium show about space and dark matter and white dwarfs and brown dwarfs. Whoopi Goldberg narrated it! No LHC news or guitar solos though.

The tour has moved to Baltimore, where we are unable to get the O's-Yanks game on our TV at the Sheraton, despite being able to look at the stadium. Inconceivable.

zman said...

Iceberg Slim documentary on Showtime! Better that the Os game.

rob said...

steph curry reportedly made 77 consecutive threes in practice this week. if you gave me two hours, i bet i could run off a streak of 7.

zman said...

Certainly between 6 and 9.

Mark said...

And he made 94/100. Absurd.