Lyrical Physics

Pdf booklet available here:  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yIK7-goWRIMtLOo7uj-otcc9MVfvdro3/view?usp=sharing

Contents:

Dark Matter Song 

Diamond Lightsource Synchrotron 

Feynman Diagram Song 

Emmy Noether 

Let There Be Higgs 

Muon Song

Neutrino Song 

Not So Complex 

Nuclear Fusion 

Science Women 

Dark Matter Song

Song tune: L’Accordeoniste

Composer: Michel Emer

Original Artist: Edith Piaf

Verse:

The thing about dark matter is that it’s hard to see,

But we know that it’s there through the effects of gravity.

When galaxies are spinning the edges go too fast,

To be explained completely by the luminous matter mass.

This was observed by Zwicky and Vera Rubin too.

The missing mass perplexed us, so we did what scientists do.

Chorus:

A hypothesis planned to help us understand,

What was making rotation curves flatter,

We just couldn’t let pass this bizarre missing mass,

So decided to call it dark matter.

It might be particles, or perhaps small black holes,

Though we’re rather less keen on the latter,

So we hope we will find a new particle kind,

That will fit the right bill for dark matter.

Verse:

There are alternate answers, like tweaking gravity,

A theory known as MOND had some popularity.

But this all falls apart when you see how light rays bend,

Around a Galaxy to form a gravitational lens.

And in the bullet cluster where galaxies had crashed,

We saw the two gas centres, but the gravity didn’t match.

Chorus:

Evidence piling high, we just couldn’t deny,

The existence of this strange dark matter,

We could see its effect, but we couldn’t detect,

A direct source, not even a smatter,

In our cosmology it’s a great mystery,

About which many physicists chatter.

It is vast in extent: twenty seven percent,

Of the known universe is dark matter.

Verse:

We found its contribution to total energy,

By measuring some blobs in the spotty CMB,

But we don’t know exactly how theory will progress,

There’s many things it might be, but a WIMP is our best guess.

So we set up some detectors deep down abandoned mines,

Who knows what we’ll discover, what answers we will find

Chorus:

We just hope it will be interacting weakly,

And in big tanks of xenon will scatter.

Or perhaps we will learn how to make it at CERN.

Supersymmetry might be the answer.

Lots of time will be spent on these experiments,

So our hopes of solutions don’t shatter.

Who knows when we’ll be done, but the search must go on,

Til we finally find some dark matter.

Must go on in our search for dark matter!

Diamond Lightsource Synchrotron

Song tune: Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend

Composer: Jule Styne

Original Artist: Marilyn Monroe

Intro:

On Harwell campus near Didcot,

You might see a giant donut,

And you may think it’s a UFO, but no,

It’s Diamond Light Source.

Verse:

We have a machine that accelerates electrons,

At diamond light source synchrotron.

It gives off a light that is brighter than the sun,

And it does so much once it goes through the optics hutch.

There it shines down the beamline,

Where scientists work all day long.

We x-ray the small things and invent some more things,

Diamond Light Source synchrotron!

Verse:

I work as a student in beam diagnostics,

At Diamond Light Source synchrotron,

A placement here might help my career prognostics,

I’ve learned lots for sure, building my halo monitor.

My machine, will image the beam,

To see where the particles have gone.

With mirrors and lenses, I’ll look where the bend is!

Diamond Light Source Synchrotron!

Verse:

We use the bright light to look so deep inside things,

At Diamond Light Source synchrotron,

From fungus to pharaohs, viruses and dinos,

Scan an ancient scroll, or batteries that are getting slow.

Users come, and users go,

But the research it still carries on,

We x-ray the Mary Rose to see it decompose,

Diamond light source synchrotron!

Feynman Diagram Song

Song tune: The Bare Necessities

Composer: Terry Gilkyson

Original Artist: Phil Harris

Chorus:

Let’s draw a Feynman diagram, a simple Feynman diagram,

Shows particles and how they interact,

I use a Feynman diagram when calculating widths I am,

When cross sections I’m wanting to extract.

Verse:

If you’ve got a photon draw a wiggly line,

Or if it’s a gluon a loop-dee-loop does fine,

For the other gauge bosons you also use the wiggly one.

If you suspect you’ve got a Higgs then a dashy line is the one you’ll dig.

Straight lines are fermions.

A Feynman diagram can be a lot of fun.

(Chorus)

Verse:

When you make a vertex, charge must be conserved,

Also 4 momentum and baryon number,

Colour and lepton number too no change of value can accrue,

A quark or gluon can’t be free, make fermions the same family.

Just follow all these tips,

And Feynman diagrams will soon be in your grips.

Bridge:

So just follow these simple rules and I’m sure that you’ll do just swell,

And if an internal particle’s mass is greater than the energy involved?

Don’t worry it’s just off shell.

And don’t spend your time messing around,

When there’s matrix elements to be found,

When realise you’ve got the gist,

You’re practically a physicist!

A Feynman diagram can be a lot of fun.

Emmy Noether

Song tune: Bye Bye Blackbird

Composer:

Original lyricist:

Notable Artist:

Verse:

Emmy Noether, born 1882,

With a curious mind,

Emmy Noether, so much that she could do,

Leaps ahead of her time.

Chorus:

Studied hard despite the rules saying girls can’t be schooled,

Emmy Noether,

Sitting at the back of class soaking in all the maths,

Emmy Noether,

Soon her research proved to be groundbreaking,

Brightest of her time there’s no mistaking,

Even Einstein found that he needed her expertise,

Emmy Noether.

Verse:

David Hilbert had to be her defence,

’This is not a bath house’,

Wasn’t payed, she had to rely on friends,

But what theorems she found.

Chorus:

For each conserved quantity corresponds symmetry,

Emmy Noether,

Objects satisfying chains after her now are named,

Noetherian.

One of history’s greatest mathematicians,

Unmatched in her abstract intuitions,

Studied groups and fields and rings, algebra, complex things,

Emmy Noether.

Let There Be Higgs

Song tune: Let There Be Love

Composer: Lionel Rand

Original lyricist: Ian Grant

Notable Artist: Nat King Cole

Let there be up and let there be down,

Let there be muons, electrons and tau,

Let there be charm, an occasional strange,

Lots of neutrinos with flavours that change.

Let there be photons and Z bosons too,

Strong little gluons and weak W,

Let there be bottom, a top quark so big,

But most of all please let there be Higgs.

Muon Song

Song tune: I’ve Got You Under My Skin

Composer: Cole Porter

Notable Artist: Frank Sinatra

The muons wobble so fast,

The muons mean that we must explore,

If there are more forces to add the previous four,

The muons wobble so fast.

The standard model is wrong,

We’ve known now for quite a long time there were things missing,

Like gravity, neutrino mass, and now there’s this new thing,

The muons wobble so fast.

The g factor tells us how fast muons spin,

As they fly through a magnetic field,

The theorists predicted a g-factor too small the match,

The results the experiments yield.

There’s new physics to find!

New questions to ask!

Are there more particles?

Is energy dark at all?

This new step began because muons can interact with the quantum foam.

Oh those muons wobble so fast.

Neutrino Song

Composer: Emily Howling

Neutrino, neutrino. 

Verse:

I’ll tell you of a little lepton, neutrino is it’s name,

A tiny charge free particle that really changed the game,

They’re very hard to detect but momentum loss gives it away,

And a 100 trillion pass through you each second of every day.

Neutrino, neutrino.

Verse:

First Pauli thought something was missing, observed beta decay,

Proposed a neutral particle took energy away,

It took us over 3 decades to finally prove he was right,

Direct neutrino detection, much to Cowan and Reines’s delight.

Neutrino, neutrino.

Verse:

It comes in just three different flavours: electron, muon and tau,

There’s also 3 neutrino masses that don’t match up some how,

The PMNS matrix tells us how much each combo must be,

If the element values are complex it violates charge parity.

Neutrino, neutrino.

Bridge:

Under a mountain, deep in a mine,

We studied the light neutrinos leave behind,

We worked out each flavour, counted it up,

But when crunching the numbers it didn’t add up.

There’s only one answer, the flavours must change.

These oscillations are very strange!

Neutrino, neutrino.

Verse:

We still have some unanswered questions, like why they have a mass,

Could they be their own opposite, Dirac or Majorana?

Just like Pauli we still study that curious beta decay,

In hope we’ll find why neutrinos act in such a peculiar way.

Neutrino, neutrino.

Not So Complex

Composer: Emily Howling

Intro:

You may have heard of CERN where big experiments are run,

To discover how the universe works and how it has begun,

We use accelerators to give hadrons energy.

Then we smash them all together and measure carefully.

Verse:

Picture with me the LHC and imagine you’re a proton,

You started off as hydrogen with 1 extra electron,

Flying through linac 4 is just the first stage of your ride,

You’ll go through 5 accelerators before you can collide.

Accelerate! Accelerate!

Verse:

Now to the proton synchrotron booster, also known as PSB,

Electrons stripped and beam chopped to inject efficiently,

Four rings to really ramp things up, so round and round we go,

Then to the proton synchrotron the next stage of the show,

Accelerate! Accelerate!

Verse:

The super proton synchrotron is bigger than the last,

With 200 MHz cavities to make the beam go fast,

Then finally the last stage 27 km round,

The large hadron collider where the Higgs boson was found.

Accelerate! Accelerate!

Verse:

You’re bunched up with a hundred thousand million of your friends,

With magnets to guide your way and drive you round the bends,

In 4 experiments the beams collide energetically,

That’s ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb!

Nuclear Fusion

Song tune: Fever

Composer: Eddie Cooley and Otis Blackwell

Original Artist: Little Willie John

Verse:

Tell me have you ever wondered,

Why it is the sun shines bright?

What gives sparkle to the night sky,

Or what floods the earth with warmth and light?

Nuclear fusion,

Hot reaction, the power that gives stars their glow,

Fusion!

That’s a fact and I’ll tell what you need to know.

Verse:

Protons in the sun’s core,

Under pressure and as hot as hell,

Join to create helium,

But can we do this in a lab as well?

Nuclear fusion,

Pressure’s low, so we gotta major on the heat.

Fusion!

Here on earth we make temperatures the sun can’t beat.

Bridge:

Gotta make some fusion plasma,

With two types of hydrogen.

Tritium is half the story,

Combine it with deuterium.

Verse:

Tokamak’s are very handy,

For keeping plasma well confined.

Strong magnetic fields form,

Around this classic donut shaped design,

To give us fusion.

Like at Culham where engineers built JET and MAST.

Fusion!

One day ITER will give power to the grid at last.

Verse:

Now you’ve learned a little physics,

Here’s the point that I have made,

Fusion’s gonna be the future,

Though it’s always 30 years away.

Nuclear fusion,

It’s got the power, unlimited and very clean,

Fusion!

Betta fund it, a harder task there’s never been,

The engineering is obscene,

But fusion power is the dream.

Science Women

Song tune: Science Fiction

Composer: Richard O’Brien

Verse:

Emmy Noether worked at Gottingen Universitat,

For 7 years without salary,

She did maths for Einstein,

Who’s bright mind she outshined,

Developed theories of symmetry.

Lise Meitner had a vision of nuclear fission,

Which now powers much of our grid,

And Cecelia Payne should have gained worldwide fame,

But too few people know what she did.

Chorus:

Science women,

More than pretty,

Chien Shiung Wu broke conservation of parity,

Marguerite Perey discovered Francium,

Maria Goeppert Mayer modelled the atom,

Oh oh oh ohhh,

Times are better but there’s still far to go.

Verse:

Rosalind Franklin she found how DNA twists round,

Her work was nicked by Watson and Crick,

Radioactivity was studied by Marie Curie,

She found ways to treat you when you get sick,

Nettie Stevens alone discovered sex chromosomes,

By spending her days studying worms.

Gertrude B Elion invented new medicine,

And Jane Cooke Wright did cancer research.

Chorus:

Science women,

Saving lives,

Thank Hedy Lamarr you’ve got wifi.

For algorithms, thank Ada Lovelace.

Mary S. Morgan fuelled NASA to space.

Oh oh oh ohhh,

Times are changing,

But there’s still far to go.

Verse:

When Jocelyn Bell was at school,

Girls can’t do science was the rule,

She had to fight for her right to learn.

Couple decades down the line,

She was doing just fine,

When pulsars were discovered by her.

Vera Rubin found a smatter of evidence for dark matter,

By watching how galaxies spin,

And Cecelia Payne, she’s worth mentioning again,

Found that stars were made of helium and hydrogen.

Chorus:

Science women,

Going far.

Annie Jump Canon Classified stars,

For Rocket Flight paths, ask Katherine Johnson,

For safe bright streetlamps, thank Hertha Ayrton,

Oh oh oh ohhh,

Times are better,

But there’s still far to go,

We all should know,

Oh ohhh,

About Rosalyn Sussman Yalow,

I really think so,

Oh ohhh,

Times are changing,

STEM equality will grow,

At least I hope so,

Oh ohhh,

Times are better,

But there’s still far to go.