Date: 28/05/2016 18:17:00
From: CrazyNeutrino
ID: 898270
Subject: This is what it sounds like when protons collide

This is what it sounds like when protons collide

Quantizer high energy physics experienced through real-time audio

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Date: 31/05/2016 19:25:24
From: mollwollfumble
ID: 899885
Subject: re: This is what it sounds like when protons collide

In the book “The big machine”, written about the CERN Proton Synchrotron in 1966, it describes the real-time sound and colour as heard in the PS control room. Not quite the same as CN’s link, but worth reading all the same.
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THE BIG MACHINE

Among my most impressive experiences at CERN are the minutes during which I could witness, through a thick glass wall, the birth-and-death drama of nuclear particles. In the abrupt, swift illuminations of the flash lamps the observer sees constantly changing but always magically beautiful images. On a gleaming purple background there appears a delicate structure of faint white circles, lines, angles, stars. Just as he wants to examine it in all its rhythmic variety, behind the oval glass window it is black again. But now another, an even more exciting picture flares up: on seven or eight staff lines there is a small explosion; a tiny satellite is cast off and falls, falls, until it vanishes in tall grass that splits and disseminates tiny spores, from which a screen of thin silver wires grows up to the sky. Then—again darkness. The ear distinguishes a loud rhythmic beating and pounding: it comes from the pistons with which the chamber pressure is suddenly decreased, causing the rapidly cooled liquid to boil. Fractions of seconds later another salvo of particles is fired: the light flash reveals a landscape of frosted needles forming vines, thistles, a tall sunflower on a tapered, symmetrically branching stem. One of the open triangles ejects a whirling spiral into the sinking landscape.

This exciting ballet of the birth, death, and transfiguration of the elementary particles is hardly ever witnessed by the members of a bubble chamber team, and when it is, then only to make sure that everything is under control. Even the physicists who later look through the photographic records of the subnuclear events exhibit as little interest in the highly esthetic pictures, which remind one of abstract art, as would a map maker or a field marshal in the beauties of a landscape.

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