(Roughly) Daily

Readers will recall the effort at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider to discover the Higg’s Boson— “The God Particle.”  The Telegraph reports that while the search for the sub-atomic fugitive continues, scientists have determined that, when it is created at the Swiss supercollider– if it is created— ” it will sound like several coins clattering around the bowl of a wine glass.”

source

Scientists used information from computer models to calculate what the creation of the particle will sound like, a process called “sonification”.

LHC Sound, a group of scientists, musicians and artists in London, has used data on the particles and matched it to qualities such as pitch and volume to determine how the collision will sound.

Dr Lily Asquith, who models data for the LHC and has contributed to the sound project, wrote on her blog: “Sound seems the perfect tool with which to represent the complexity of the data.

“Our ears are superb at locating the source and location of sounds relative to one another … We also have an incredible ability to notice slight changes in pitch or tempo over time and to recognise patterns in sound after hearing them just once.”

Read the full report here.

As we reinterpret the soundtracks of our lives, we might recall that it was on this date in 1742, in a letter to Leonhard Euler, that Christian Goldbach outlined his famous proposition, now know as “Goldbach’s Conjecture”:

Every even natural number greater than 2 is equal to the sum of two prime numbers.

It has been checked by computer for vast numbers– up to at least 4 x 1014– but remains unproved.

Goldbach’s letter to Euler (source, and larger view)