Music Inspired by Fermi Particles

Environmental & Science Education
STEM
Cosmology
Art and Environment
Edward Hessler

Neutrinos are strange, those ultra small elementary particles, millions of which blast right through earth and us every day. At first they were thought to be without mass and also stable but it is known that they have mass and the curious behavior of changing form--there are three kinds as they move through time and space.

In December 1960, The New Yorker published John Updike's poem about the neutrino titled Cosmic Gall. In 2011 Symmetry Magazine published both the poem and a line-by-line analysis of the  physics known about them. They are sometimes referred to as "ghost particles."

Fermi Accelerator Laboratory's current guest composer David Ibbett has written a musical score for them for soprano, violin, viola, piano and electronics "titled, appropriately, "Particles of Doubt." The video (3m 38s), a preview of the premiere, is more than the performance and includes "scenes from an animation of the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment hosted by FermiLab."

There is also a "second feature" (2m47s) a video titled, "Liquid Argon  live at Fermilab ICARUS Detector."

Minute Physics has a short video (1m 24s) about neutrinos. You may still be left wondering what they are!