It has been sixty-five years since the Allies dropped atomic bombs on the unsuspecting populace of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A couple of weeks back the world remembered the thousands and thousands of people who lost their lives, either on that day or for years afterwards from diseases caused by their exposure to radiation – people whose only fault was being born into one country and not another. No one asked for their opinion when their country went to war – they did not matter. And yet it was they who paid for it. With their lives.
And all the children who died… Imagine the magnitude of human potential lost in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (or for that matter, in the gas chambers of Germany, or on the bloodied roads of Nanking). One such child was Sadako Sasaki.
Sadako was only two years old at the time of the first bomb and about 1.7 km away from ground zero. She survived. Only to die ten years later from leukaemia – the atom bomb disease. The story goes that when Sadako was slowly wasting away in the hospital she was paid a visit by her best friend, who made an origami paper crane for her and told her about the Japanese saying that one is granted a wish if one folds a thousand paper cranes. Inspired by this, Sadako started making paper cranes – her wish, to live. There are two versions of whether Sadako managed to finish a thousand. According to one she completed 644, and according to another she completed a thousand and kept folding more. But she died any way, on the morning of October 25, 1955, at the age of 12.
The Children’s Peace Monument in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park has immortalized Sadako where she is placed on top, holding a crane. The base of the monument reads,
“This is our cry. This is our prayer. Peace on Earth”
Sixty-five years have passed and the prayer has yet to be answered.
Sitting in the shade of a tree in an empty lot, the congregants raised their hymn books and, in response, the police, lined up in a ragged cordon, raised their riot shields. Sunday service was starting for the local Batak Christian Protestant Church… Across the barricade, enraged young Muslim men in white skullcaps surged forward as the first song in praise of Jesus Christ chimed out. Using their own speakers, they tried to drown out the hymn with their own Arabic chant, “la ilaha ilallah” — there is no god but Allah.
The root of the problem is the fact that in Indonesia, by the Joint Ministerial Decree 1/2006 of the Ministry of Religion, to build any place of worship in a particular area, it is necessary to have a minimum of 90 members and to obtain the support of 60 local residents who are non-members. Now how easy is that in a nearly 90% Muslim majority nation? So minority groups gather in private homes or hotels or shops etc. to conduct their business and are open to allegations of violating the law and in some cases attack from Muslim vigilante groups.
What happens when a group of particle physicists, composers, software developers and artists get together? This!
You must have heard about the LHC experiment – the Large Hadron Collider. If not its scientific aspects, at least the doomsday theories surrounding it! LHC is a particle accelerator on the Switzerland-France border, 100m below the earth. The experiment consists of two beams of hadrons(either protons or lead ions) colliding head to head, after gaining high levels of energy, with each successive lap inside the circular accelerator. This is an attempt to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang and will be used by physicists to study the smallest known, fundamental particles, the ‘brick and mortar’ of our Universe, that is expected to be created in the collisions. A number of detectors will assist the physicists in this job and one such detector is called ATLAS.
So what is LHCsound?
LHCsound: the sonification of the ATLAS detector data output.
LHCsound is funded by the STFC as a public outreach project, but also has potential as a physics analysis/ detector monitoring tool and as a resource for musical composition and performance.
In other words, the results of the ATLAS detector has been turned in to sounds! The benefit for physicists is that, since the ear is more tuned to detect changes in patterns than the eye, it is likely that anomalies in expected patterns(new particles), if any, can be detected far more easily if the results were presented as sounds. This project is the brainchild of Lily Asquith, a high energy physicist working on the ATLAS and Richard Dobson, a musician and a software developer. And the results are über cool!
Listen to the Decay of a God Particle!
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For a detailed explanation on this sound file, please click here. For the complete set of sounds, here.
If you read the About section of this blog you will know that Eliot is my favourite poet and reading his poetry has been one of those life-changing experiences of mine!
I have these tapes of Eliot reading his own poems which I bought from Amazon a few years back. Finally, fighting all my procrastinating habits I have started to convert them to digital format. So I though I would share them here. This is the first instalment where he reads the entire ‘The Waste Land’.
I. The Burial of the Dead
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II. A Game of Chess
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III. The Fire Sermon
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IV. Death by Water
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V. What the Thunder said
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Two invaluable resources for anyone interested in following all the recent discoveries and updates about the world’s most enigmatic and tantalizing ancient civilization. They also have some great photos. These rank high among places I want to go before I die.
Welcome to Trailblazing, an interactive timeline for everybody with an interest in science. Compiled by scientists, science communicators and historians – and co-ordinated … [Continue reading Trailblazing – a virtual journey through Science]
The formula! This video is brought to us by BriTANicK – Two Guys Wasting Their Degrees! “BriTANicK screamed into existence in early 2008 … [Continue reading Academy Award Winning Movie Trailer!]
Samuel Beckett‘s Waiting for Godot needs no introduction. It has earned its place as a classic of modern literature and got Beckett a … [Continue reading Waiting for Godot]
Political prisoners’ wives harassed in Havana – BBC “On leaving the church they were surrounded by an angry mob and shoved off the … [Continue reading Ladies in White]
“Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a … [Continue reading Question with boldness…]
“You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live … [Continue reading Doubt, Uncertainty & Not Knowing]
On Valentine’s Day, 1990, Voyager 1, having completed its primary mission objectives, was ready to leave the Solar System. At the request of … [Continue reading The Pale Blue Dot]
You’ve probably seen this if you’ve been following the news. The creators of the popular animated show South Park were threatened by a … [Continue reading Right to Draw]
The Waste Land Blog is all about a bystander's perspective. It is about events around the world, discoveries on the web, inspiration in the arts, greatness amongst us - anything that arouses passions, amusement, anger, hope, depression, joy, frustrations or ecstacy.
(That is the short version - the long version is here!)
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And finally, here is a list of ten of my all-time favourite albums on sale at Amazon. In case you are looking at buying any of them please follow the links here - you will be doing me a favour at no extra cost to you! Thank you!
In other words, the results of the ATLAS detector has been turned in to sounds! The benefit for physicists is that, since the ear is more tuned to detect changes in patterns than the eye, it is likely that anomalies in expected patterns(new particles), if any, can be detected far more easily if the results were presented as sounds. This project is the brainchild of Lily Asquith, a high energy physicist working on the ATLAS and Richard Dobson, a musician and a software developer. And the results are über cool!
If you read the 
