Cern scientists' rap is YouTube hit

The video explains the LHC's functions to a background beat

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project at Cern have recorded a rap song to celebrate the start of their experiments.

The video explains the LHC's functions to a background beat and features white coated scientist dancing in the collision chamber. It has become a hit on YouTube, logging over 2.5 million hits in under two weeks.

The lyric includes the lines:

Twenty seven kilometres, a tunnel underground,
Designed with a mind to send protons around.
A circle that crosses through Switzerland and France,
Sixty nations contribute to scientific advance.

The video was shot by Kate MacAlpine (rap name 'Alpinekat') who is a trainee at Cern.

"I did a science rap when I was working at the American Physical Society last summer before coming to Cern," MacAlpine, from Lowell near Grand Rapids in Michigan, and a graduate in writing and physics from Michigan State University, told Reuters.

"I wrote this on the bus on the way to and from work at Cern. Then we all got together to make the video. We all hoped it would help explain what's going on at Cern."

While the video was done off the cuff, it appears that there are considerable musical talents at Cern.

Professor Bran Cox, who is working on the Atlas section of the LHC, was a keyboard player for 90s pop band D:Ream before he gave up music for particle physics.

The LHC, the world's biggest scientific experiment, went live yesterday but the first atom smashing will not happen for another 30 days.

Scientists are using the device in an attempt to find the Higgs Boson particle which gives all matter mass.