When rap, physics, and fame collide
You can put Kate McAlpine in a giant particle accelerator 300 feet underground. You can even put her in a rap video. Just don't put her in a box.
That's a tenet the 23-year-old Michigan native--who recently climbed the YouTube charts with a rap video on the Large Hadron Collider--embraced long ago in choosing a career as a science writer. She tips the hat to her dad, who was annoyed by the results of her career aptitude test in high school that sought to place her in a particular field.
"They're trying to put you in a box," she recalls her father saying. But they didn't succeed. (Read: her dual degree from Michigan State University in professional writing and physics and an excerpt from her personal statement. "I have pitched my camp at a crossroads: the intersection of science and writing.")
Kate McAlpine poses for a shot inside the Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS detector, which is now the focus of her communications work for CERN.
(Credit: Cristina Jimenez )Further determined to bring together the worlds of art and science (and the cool kids with the geeks) McAlpine, aka "alpinekat" started writing rap songs to help explain scientific principles, a sort of School House Rock meets Bill Nye the Science Guy with a hip-hop twist.
Her first rap was about Michigan State's National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory, where she was a summer intern. She notes that it was loosely based on Eminem's "Lose Yourself," mostly for the "Back to the lab again yo" line. She wrote the second one on neurochips while working as an intern for the American Physical Society. She turned that rap into a video and put it up on YouTube.
McAlpine didn't hit the big time, however, until the third aforementioned piece, "Large Hadron Rap," which, in simple-but-not-dumbed-down terms, explains the particle physics experiments to take place at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, where McAlpine has been interning in various writing and communications capacities. The rap video--featuring her fellow CERN interns dancing in the gigantic particle accelerator some 300 feet underground on the French-Swiss border--has been viewed on YouTube more than 3.3 million times and has triggered almost 1,000 viewer comments.
"I had hoped this (rap) would go a little farther than the last and people would learn something about the LHC," she said. "But no way did I expect it to go this far."
It's been "one of the best PR efforts attached to the LHC," said James Riordon, media relations head and McAlpine's former boss at the American Physical Society. Riordon, who encouraged McAlpine to turn the neurochip rap into an MP3 and video, added that not only is she a ham willing to "put her nerdiness out there," but her raps and other writings are engaging, informative, and accurate.
McAlpine, who splits her time working for CERN between London and Geneva, put the Large Hadron Rap up on YouTube at the end of July. But its viewership numbers didn't take off until about a week or so before the LHC's September 10 launch date. (The LHC has since been shut down until spring due to a malfunction that caused a helium leak.) YouTube put the rap on its home page as a featured video and then CNN and a flood of other media outlets started to notice, she said.
And people apparently just couldn't get enough. "When I put up the Large Hadron Rap, 600 people had seen the neurochip rap (embedded below)," said McAlpine, whose formal musical training is limited to high school band. "And now, last I checked, (the neurochip rap) had over 10,000 views."
McAlpine prefers the Large Hadron Rap to her earlier works because she brought on a talented outsider--Will Barras, the brother of one of the CERN communications interns--to lay the beats. In all, the video took about 35 to 40 hours to write and produce, McAlpine estimated. Of course, that didn't include the time it took to clear the filming of the video down in the LHC cavern. In response to her request, the head of the press office wrote, "I heard you were trying to bring rappers into the Atlas (detector) cavern." She said she sent him back the lyrics for review and explained the "rappers" were mere interns, "no one really risque."
Response to the rap video, for the most part, has been overwhelming positive, even among physicists. A few, however, "think that particle physics is far too serious to be featured in a rap video," McAlpine said. Many of the YouTube comments, she added, are from those worried about black holes.
But the best responses, McAlpine said, have been requests from teachers who want to show the rap video in their classrooms.
"I guess that's probably the highest honor," she said, adding that she's made the video downloadable from both YouTube and TeacherTube.
Next up for McAlpine: a rap on the results of the LHC experiments, which she promises in the first LHC rap will "rock you in the head."
Michelle Meyers is an associate editor who tracks online happenings in media, entertainment, and politics. E-mail Michelle. 
Breaking News: September 24, 2008 - 'LHC on hold until spring of 2009' - PhysicsWorld.com: "The magnet failure last week at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) means that the accelerator will not be up and running again until early spring of 2009, say officials at CERN. To keep the project on schedule, the team running the accelerator near Geneva have decided to skip a planned test run at an intermediate energy and re-start the LHC in 2009 at the full beam energy of 7 TeV.") And begin creating Black Holes.
Zealous, jealous, Nobel Prize hungry Physicists are racing each other and stopping at nothing to try to find the supposed 'Higgs Boson'(aka God) Particle, among others, and are risking nothing less than the annihilation of the Earth and all Life in endless experiments hoping to prove a theory when urgent tangible problems face the planet. The European Organization for Nuclear Research(CERN) new Large Hadron Collider(LHC) is the world's most powerful atom smasher that will soon be firing groups of billions of heavy subatomic particles at each other at nearly the speed of light to create Miniature Big Bangs producing Micro Black Holes, Strangelets, AntiMatter and other potentially cataclysmic phenomena as described below.(Risk Evaluations HERE.)
Particle physicists have run out of ideas and are at a dead end forcing them to take reckless chances with more and more powerful and costly machines to create new and never-seen-before, unstable and unknown matter while Astrophysicists, on the other hand, are advancing science and knowledge on a daily basis making new discoveries in these same areas by observing the universe, not experimenting with it and with your life.
The LHC is a dangerous gamble as CERN physicist Alvaro De Rújula in the BBC LHC documentary, 'The Six Billion Dollar Experiment', incredibly admits quote, "Will we find the Higgs particle at the LHC? That, of course, is the question. And the answer is, science is what we do when we don't know what we're doing." And CERN spokesmodel Brian Cox follows with this stunning quote, "the LHC is certainly, by far, the biggest jump into the unknown."
The CERN-LHC website Mainpage itself states: "There are many theories as to what will result from these collisions,..." Again, this is because they truly don't know what's going to happen. They are experimenting with forces they don't understand to obtain results they can't comprehend. If you think like most people do that 'They must know what they're doing' you could not be more wrong. Some people think similarly about medical Dr.s but consider this by way of comparison and example from JAMA: "A recent Institute of Medicine report quoted rates estimating that medical errors kill between 44,000 and 98,000 people a year in US hospitals." The second part of the CERN quote reads "...but what's for sure is that a brave new world of physics will emerge from the new accelerator,..." A molecularly changed or Black Hole consumed Lifeless World? The end of the quote reads "...as knowledge in particle physics goes on to describe the workings of the Universe." These experiments to date have so far produced infinitely more questions than answers but there isn't a particle physicist alive who wouldn't gladly trade his life to glimpse the "God particle", and sacrifice the rest of us with him. Reason and common sense will tell you that the risks far outweigh any potential(as CERN physicists themselves say) benefits.
This quote from National Geographic, "The hunt for the God particle", exactly sums this "science" up: "If all goes right, matter will be transformed by the violent collisions into wads of energy, which will in turn condense back into various intriguing types of particles, some of them never seen before. That's the essence of experimental particle physics: "You smash stuff together and see what other stuff comes out." Read about the "other stuff" below:
http://www.SaneScience.org
http://www.risk-evaluation-forum.org/anon6.htm
http://www.LHCFacts.org/
http://www.LHCDefense.org/
http://www.LHCConcerns.com/
Popular Mechanics - "World's Biggest Science Project Aims to Unlock 'God Particle'" - http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/extreme_machines/4216588.html"
Will we find the Higgs particle at the LHC? That, of course, is the question. And the answer is, science is what we do when we don't know what we're doing
How exactly are we supposed to make progress if we keep jumping into the known? How exactly do we advance without trying new things?
(A recent Institute of Medicine report quoted rates estimating that medical errors kill between 44,000 and 98,000 people a year in US hospitals - just to add that CERN gave us MRI technology, significantly reducing said errors)
http://www.break.com/pictures/half-life-collider573389.html
View the link:
http://blackholefactory.com/blog4/2008/09/26/large-hadron-collider-updates/
-Michael
When you mix garbage with anything, it's still garbage.
Any time someone can find a way to take educational material and put it in a format that's fun, lively, with a catchy beat, etc. that's a good thing. People who would never even think of picking up a book about physics can learn something from this video. Some of them might even be inspired to pursue further study of physics. The same thing happened for me with astronomy (NOT astrology!) not too long ago. I now find it fascinating.
- by Dan_Tana November 13, 2008 11:29 AM PST
- LAME. Need I say more? I admire her studies of The Sciences, but her use of (c)rap is unforgivable.
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