Tim Blais, the singing scientist behind “Bohemian Gravity,” “Rolling in the Higgs” and “The Surface of Light,” is back with another pop parody that’s packed with physics. And this time it’s as big as a black hole – or at least the gravitational waves generated by black holes crashing together.
“LIGO Feel that Space,” sung to the tune of “I Can’t Feel My Face” by The Weeknd, delves into the potentially Nobel-winning detection of gravitational waves by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, better known as LIGO.
Last month’s announcement about the detection set off a wave of wonderment, in part because it affirmed one of the predictions made a century earlier by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Gravitational-wave observations are also expected to provide a new way to study the universe’s most dramatic phenomena, such as supernovae, black hole mergers and neutron star collisions.
Making the detection was an engineering as well as a scientific feat: To detect the faint ripples in space-time, two facilities boasting miles-long tunnels and super-sensitive laser equipment had to be built near Livingston, La., and on the Hanford Reservation in Washington state. The project was inaugurated back in 1999, but the crucial detection couldn’t be made until after last year’s upgrade of the facilities.
Blais’ earlier A Capella Science parodies took on string theory, the discovery of the Higgs boson and the dust-up over data from the BICEP2 detector. “LIGO Feel That Space” is equally laden with in-jokes for physicists – for example, Blais’ reference to the Fabry-Perot interferometer and the line where he says “all you GR haters, you were wrong-ong-ong.” (Full lyrics here.)
The rest of us will probably get a better sense of what all the gravitational-wave hubbub is all about by watching videos from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics or PHD Comics, but Blais’ rendition definitely has a beat you can dance to.
To learn more about Blais and his blend of science and song, check out the profile published today by the Perimeter Institute.
