Large Hadron Rap (Habrahabr edition)

Twenty-seven kilometers of tunnel underground, / designed with mind to send protons around / a circle that crosses through Swtizerland and France. / Sixty nations contribute to scientific advance.

Two beams of protons swing 'round through the ring they ride / 'til in the hearts of the detectors they're made to collide!

And all that energy packed in such a tiny bit of room / becomes mass particles created from the vacuum. / And then....

(Chorus 1) LHCb sees where the antimatter's gone / ALICE looks at collisions of lead ions / CMS and ATLAS are two of a kind: / They're looking for whatever new particles they can find.

(Chorus 2) The LHC accelerates the protons and the lead, / and the things that it discovers will rock you in the head.

We see asteroids and planets stars galore / We know a black hole resides at each galaxy's core / But even all that matter cannot explain what holds / all these stars together something else remains.

This dark matter interacts only through gravity / And how do you catch a particle there's no way to see? / Тake it back to consevation of energy, / and the particles appear clear as can be.

You see particles flyin' in jets they spray, / but you notice there ain't nothin' goin' the other way.

You say, "My law has just been violated! / That don't make sense! / There's gotta be another particle to make this balance!"

And it might be dark matter and for the first time, / we catch a glimpse of what must fill / most of the known 'Verse / Because...

(Chorus 1)

Antimatter is sort of like matter's evil twin.

Because except for charge and handedness of spin, / they're the same for a particle and its anti-self, / but you can't store an anti-particle of any shelf.

Cuz when it meets its normal twin, they both annihilate. / Matter turns to energy, and then, it dissipates.

When matter is created from energy, / which is exactly what they'll do in the LHC, / you get matter and antimatter in equalparts, / and they try to take this back to when the universe starts: / the Big Bang.

Back when all the matter exploded, / But the amount of antimatter was somehow eroded! / Because when we look around we see that matter abounds, / but the antimatter's nowhere to be found. / That's why....

(Chorus 1) / (Chorus 2)

The Higgs boson, that's the one that everybody talks about, / and it's the one sure thing that this machine will sort out. / If the Higgs exists they ought to see it right away, / And if it doesn't, the scientists will finally say,

"There is no Higgs! We need new physics / to account for why things have mass." / "Something in our Standard Model went awry!"

But the Higgs -- I still haven't said just what it does. / They suppose that particles have mass because... / There is this Higgs field that extends through all space, / and some particles slow down while other particles race straight through, like the photon / it has no mass but something heavy / like the top quark, it's draggin' its ---(!)

And the Higgs is a boson that carries a force, / and makes particles take orders / from the field that is its source. / They'll detect it...

(Chorus 1)

Now some of you may think that gravity is strong, / cuz when you fall off your bicycle, it don't take long / Until you hit the earth, and you say,"Dang that hurt!"

But if you think the force is powerful, you're wrong. / You see, gravity, it's weaker than weak! / And the reason why is something many scientists seek.

They think about dimensions. / We live in just three, but maybe there are others / that are too small to see.

It's into these dimensions that gravity extends, / which makes it seem weaker here on our end.

And these dimensions are rolled up, curled so tight / that they don't affect you in your day-to-day life.

But if you were as tiny as a graviton, / you could enter these dimensions and go wandering on. / And they'd find you...

(Chorus 1) / (Chorus 2)