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Strange Charm: A Song about Quarks

2010-10-20 · song · Hank · 2:32 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Science & nature (also: Projects) · mode: Comedy & performance · tags: song or performance, self promotion

Hank sings an explainer about quarks (flavours, hadrons, color charge, baryons and mesons) and says that we have identified them at all leaves him in awe; he then launches dft.ba, a URL shortener made by friends Sam and Alan.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Greeting and introduction of the quark song 'Strange Charm'

  • ★★ Hank introduces a song he wrote about quarks, called 'Strange Charm'. — 00:00:00

00:00:09 — The song: what quarks are, flavours, hadrons, charge and confinement, baryons and mesons, awe at their discovery

  • ★★★ The song says a quark is a fundamental constituent of matter, observed in 1968 through 'deep elastic scatter', which showed protons are not solid but made of three pieces. — 00:00:09

  • ★★★ The chorus names the quarks up, down, strange, charm, top and bottom, says you have them even if you don't know what a quark is, and that with leptons and bosons they make up everything we know exists. (hedged) — 00:00:31

    “if you don't know what a quark is, it don't matter you still got 'em”

  • ★★ The song says things made of quarks, such as protons and neutrons, are composite particles called hadrons; many types are theoretically described, but most exist only very briefly. — 00:00:42

  • ★★ The song says quarks have electric charge, color charge, mass and spin; color charge means they exist only inside other particles, so they have never been studied alone. — 00:00:53
  • ★★ The song says quarks join in two ways, baryons (three quarks) and mesons (a quark and an antiquark), and that most instantly decay. — 00:01:15

  • ★★★ Hank sings that quarks are part of almost everything and no unified theory makes them less confusing, but that we identified them at all is so remarkable he sits in awe. — 00:01:26

    “the fact that we've identified that they exist at all is so goddamn remarkable that I just sit in awe”

00:01:48 — The song at dft.ba/quarks; launch of the dft.ba URL shortener by Sam and Alan; sign-off

  • ★★ Hank says the song is at dft.ba/quarks, made possible by his friends Sam and Alan, who created dft.ba, a URL shortener that reminds people not to forget to be awesome. — 00:01:48 · Alan Lastufka, DFTBA
  • ★★ Hank says anyone can now make their own dft.ba URLs by going to dft.ba. — 00:02:08
  • ★ Hank calls dft.ba one more way that Nerdfighteria is taking over the internet. (playful) — 00:02:15 · Nerdfighteria

In the description and comments

  • ★ The description says the animated video was made in Illustrator and After Effects and took a ridiculously long time. — video description

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: dft.ba · quark · Strange Charm

Also: Terms: DFTBA

Concepts: baryon · boson · bottom quark · charm quark · color charge · deep inelastic scattering · down quark · electric charge · hadron · lepton · mass · meson · neutron · proton · spin (physics) · strange quark · top quark · up quark · wonder (emotion)

Only in the description or credits: Adobe After Effects · Adobe Illustrator · Alan Lastufka · Sam (developer (friend of Hank))

Also centred on quark: An Evening of Awesome at Carnegie Hall

Also centred on Strange Charm: An Evening of Awesome at Carnegie Hall

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