Thursday, March 13, 2008

Dark Matter Music From CDMS

This is a bit out of the ordinary.

This is taken from Fermilab Today newsletter for March 13, 2008:

Karl Ramberg sometimes incorporates music into his artwork. But a trip with his brother, Fermilab physicist Erik Ramberg, added science to his palette. Karl, with the help of scientists, produced a full-scale, plastic model of a dark matter detector that translates its data into light and sound.

"The end result is that you get an experience, aurally and visually, of subatomic affects," Karl said. "You get a better understanding of what the data is saying."

The musical detector, a YouTube sensation, is modeled after the real Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, an underground experiment searching for dark matter particles. The actual CDMS experiment detects and records the energies of particles that strike its five towers. The model takes that one step further, expressing the data in color and tone according to particles and their properties. The idea for the model was inspired by a trip to the Soudan, Minn. mine that houses the CDMS experiment, where Erik, a CDMS collaborator, took shifts.


So this is essentially data translated into music.



It could pass for a New Age music, I would think. :)

Zz.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

pretty cool

Kent Leung said...

You know, I get a little sick of the tacky-ness that is dark matter, anti-matter & dark energy for the general public. This video demonstrates nicely how we have to dumb down all the physics, in this case turn data into multi-colored light & sound, before it appeals to the general public. What has happened to intellectual enjoy these days? Anyway, it's a point that you've made in previous posts. I am still ambivalent to the whole idea.