Special Episode: The Strings of the King!
Posted Apr 1, 2012 by bn
*NOTE* This was an awesome adequate April Fools Prank. This show had no content, just a piece of music called the “Most Unwanted Song” by Komar and Melamid. It was designed in such a way that only something like 4 people on earth would enjoy listening to it. Also, no one has proven string theory. HAHA. APRIL FOOLS.
So I don’t know if anyone will outright say that Elvis Presley, The King of Rock and Roll actually PROVED string theory. Technically, a collaboration between Ed Witten and a group at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven will be given credit by future historians (and the Nobel Prize Committee).
Nevertheless, One really interesting aspect of this story is about how Witten’s physical Insight which led to the experiment was inspired by a letter written by Elvis (and never mailed) a week before his death. Apparently Elvis occasionally corresponded with Steve Weinberg, and had some really interesting things to say about global solutions in string theory.
Given the breaking nature of this story, I’ve put together a fantastic crew for this show! Dave Tsang, Jocelyn Read, and Fionna Burnell to explain the theory, and Ken Clark to explain the experiment itself!
Today’s show starts with a short musical composition that gets mentioned a lot in the explanations, so please listen to it all the way through.
Date: April 1, 2012
I’ve Deleted the Podcast (hopefully), but some of you will surely want to hear more about the “most unwanted music”. Pretty Much, Komar and Melamid did some surveys to find out what people liked least about various songs (Children singing, Holiday songs, walmart, cowboy songs, abrupt changes of tempo, etc.) and then put them all into ONE SUPER LONG SONG. It has rapping Sopranos who sing cowboy songs, and children singing walmart xmas ads, and bad protest songs yelled through a megaphone. It’s wonderful. to learn more, read the Wired Article, or listen to the This American Life episode. Or if you haven’t eaten recently, you can even listen to the song in its entirety.
HAHAHAHAHAH!
Physicists: Dave Tsang, Ken Clark, Jocelyn Read, Fionna Burnell The “Most Unwanted Song” by Komar and Melamid
Intro Music: Ted Leo and the Pharmacists
Exit Music: John Vanderslice
