Bohemian Gravity: String Theory Explored With an A Cappella Version of Bohemian Rhapsody

This past spring, Tim­o­thy Blais wrote his mas­ters the­sis at McGill Uni­ver­si­ty in Mon­tre­al. Titled “A new quan­ti­za­tion con­di­tion for par­i­ty-vio­lat­ing three-dimen­sion­al grav­i­ty,” the the­sis clocks in at 74 pages and gets into some seri­ous physics. The first line reads: “(2+1)-dimensional grav­i­ty with a neg­a­tive cos­mo­log­i­cal con­stant is a topo­log­i­cal the­o­ry with no local degrees of free­dom.” I have to admit that Tim lost me right there. But he has made some amends with Bohemi­an Grav­i­ty, a poten­tial­ly viral video that explores string the­o­ry with the help of an a cap­pel­la par­o­dy of Queen’s Bohemi­an Rhap­sody. I have to admit that I don’t quite under­stand the sub­stance of the video either. But I am thor­ough­ly enter­tained and that counts for some­thing.

Blais pre­vi­ous­ly record­ed “Rolling in the Hig­gs,” a sci­en­tif­ic riff on Adele’s song. Accord­ing to his Face­book page, these “sci­ence-par­o­dy cre­ations are 100% orig­i­nal­ly record­ed and made out of unal­tered sounds from his mouth, throat and vocal cords.” Keep an eye on his YouTube Chan­nel, acapel­la­science, for more videos (we hope) in the future.

H/T Robin/via I F’ing Love Sci­ence

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Gui­tarist Bri­an May Explains the Mak­ing of Queen’s Clas­sic Song, ‘Bohemi­an Rhap­sody’

Lis­ten to Fred­die Mer­cury and David Bowie on the Iso­lat­ed Vocal Track for the Queen Hit ‘Under Pres­sure,’ 1981

The Hig­gs Boson, AKA the God Par­ti­cle, Explained with Ani­ma­tion

What’s Next for the Large Hadron Col­lid­er? PhD Comics Intro­duces the Search for Extra Dimen­sions

Free Physics Cours­es