“Particle of doubt” is the latest musical offering from David Ibbett, who is guest composer at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside Chicago. It is about the neutrinos and is sung in the above video by the soprano Beth Sterling. My favourite line is “You should be changeless. But the change gives us hope we’ll know where we came from”. The video also features Ibbett talking about the process of creating physics inspired compositions.
Engineers at the University of Sheffield in the UK have made the website Flashy Science free to use by UK schools during the coronavirus pandemic. Aimed at GCSE and A-Level physics students, the website contains virtual experiments and is normally a paid-for resource.
Later this month the first crewed test flight of the Crew Dragon spacecraft will blast off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Manufactured by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the reusable spacecraft will be the first crewed orbital spacecraft launched from the US since 2011 – when NASA’s Space Shuttle programme ended.
The test mission is called DEMO-2 and will be piloted by two astronauts, Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken. The NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine has just tweeted about how they will be transported to the launch pad – no surprises that they will arrive in style in a Tesla Model X complete with NASA livery. Perhaps for the next launch, Musk’s The Boring Company can excavate a tunnel under Cape Canaveral for the car to drive through.