Scientists convert LHC data into music!
By ANITuesday, January 4, 2011
LONDON - Scientists have turned the 40 million pieces of data processed by the Large Hardon Collider into sound.
Until now, the LHC had been able to produce images by spraying particles in different directions, but physicist Dr Lily Asquith, who until recently worked with the LHC at CERN, the European Organisation For Nuclear Research, wanted to be able to hear the particles.
“You tend to personify things that you think about a lot. I think electrons, perhaps, sound like a glockenspiel to me. It’s quite easy… to consider that there could be some kind of sound associated with these things,” the Daily Mail quoted her as saying.
Asquith fed in a sample - three columns of numbers - of the LHC data into the software.
As a beam of particles is shot through the collider, three data points are collected and mapped to sound parameters: the particle travelling away from the internal beam becomes the sound’s pitch, the amount of energy a particle is transformed into volume, and the timing of the notes shows how far the particle travels.
Asquith explained that although the sounds don’t tell scientists much at the moment, she expects they will shed new light on understanding the data soon. (ANI)
