Big Bang project gets rap treatment online

Scientists look at computer screens at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) control center of the CERN in Geneva September 3, 2008.

GENEVA (Reuters) - A project to re-enact the "Big Bang" at CERN near Geneva on Wednesday is getting the rap treatment on the Internet from a group of young people working there.

"Twenty seven kilometers, a tunnel underground

"Designed with a mind to send protons around

"A circle that crosses through Switzerland and France

"Sixty nations contribute to scientific advance," it runs.

The nearly five-minute video has been a big hit on YouTube (www.youtube.com) and some other sites (www.vimeo.com and www.teachertube.com), far more than the 23-year-old American would-be science writer who wrote the words ever expected.

"It had an educational purpose. I thought it might make it into a few physics classrooms and perhaps be picked by some people randomly on line," says Kate MacAlpine -- rap name Alpinekat -- who is a trainee at CERN.

The video, largely filmed in CERN's vast underground caverns along the Franco-Swiss border, explains for the uninitiated the high-profile project around the gigantic Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, running round a 27 km (17-mile) tunnel.

Young scientists and other trainee colleagues of MacAlpine jig around in yellow safety helmets as she raps her words to a rhythmic beat.

"I did a science rap when I was working at the American Physical Society last summer, before coming to CERN," says MacAlpine, from Lowell near Grand Rapids in Michigan and a graduate in writing and physics from Michigan State University.

"I wrote this on the bus on the way to and from work at CERN. Then we all got together to make the video," she says. "We all hoped it would help explain what's going on at CERN...."

DIRECT ABOUT LHC

The rap words are direct about the LHC. "The things that it discovers, will rock you on the head," they declare.

"We think of dimensions, we live in just three.

"But maybe there are others, we're going to see."

And the video seeks to explain one of the prime aims of the multi-billion dollar experiment:

"The Higgs Boson that the one, that everybody talks about

"It's the one sure thing that this machine will sort out.

"If the Higgs exists, they ought to see it right away

"And if it doesn't, then the scientists will say:

"'There is no Higgs. We need new physics

"To account for why things have mass."

The slight, slim-built MacAlpine blinks in the bright sun as she speaks outside the main CERN building right by a Swiss border post. "You can't say I'm a physicist. The maths bore me," she says, with a grin.

"I want to explain science to people, work in communicating what it's about when I go back home at the end of the year."

And before then? "Hopefully, I'll get to see some collisions," she says. What did she think about fears spreading like wildfire on the Internet alongside her video that the LHC experiment will cause cosmological disaster?

"I think there's just no chance that there's going to be a black hole that destroys the earth from this machine," says the rapper. Cosmic rays hit the earth often at much higher energy than anything in the LHC.

"So if we were going to be sucked up by a black hole, it would have happened by now."

(Editing by Stephanie Nebehay and Sami Aboudi)