If the 2008 Large Hadron Collider rap didn’t appeal to your musical sensibilities, you might try two science songs now making the internets rounds.

The first isn’t really new at all: Joe Sabia has employed Google Instant for a pastiche based on Tom Lehrer’s 1959 Elements Song, which in turn parodied Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1879 Major General’s Song.

[via Boing Boing]

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“It’s as if we’re fish who have suddenly discovered we’re in water,” said Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek about the Large Hadron Collider. “The LHC is the device for ruffling up the waters so that we can see waves.”

Wilczek took part in a panel discussion at a World Science Festival event on Saturday. The discussion revealed a bit more about how physicists will do the ruffling and what waves they expect to see. Besides once again allaying doomsday fears, the panel discussed each detector in the LHC and how it will help them find the “cosmic molasses” we’re swimming in–what gives everything in the universe mass.

Their prime suspect is, of course, the Higgs Boson–the last animal in the Standard Model theory’s particle zoo–but what happens if the LHC can’t find it?

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Large Hadron Collider physicists have heard the voice of the “god particle,” the Higgs boson, and it sounds a bit like a child’s music box.

Lily Asquith, a physicist searching for the Higgs boson–the elementary particle believed to give everything in the universe mass–is using more than her eyes. With artists and other physicists, she started the LHCsound project to hear subatomic particles.

New Scientist reports that the idea arose from a conversation between Asquith and percussionist Eddie Real:

“I was actually doing impersonations of different particles and trying to get him to develop them on his electronic drum kit.”

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When the Large Hadron Collider at CERN turns on for the first time in September, scientists may discover exciting new particles that either solidify or shatter the laws of physics. But until that happens, we might as well revel at the outrageous, creative theories surrounding the super-speed particle accelerator.

First we heard about the disaster that will occur when the LHC turns on, including miniature black holes that will swallow the planet; scientists quickly debunked that hypothesis. Now two physicists claim in a new study that no matter how hard we try, we may never turn the LHC on at all.

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