About Thomas Gutierrez

I'm a writer, musician, and physics professor at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.

Mathematica One-Liner Competition 2012

Decided to enter Wolfram’s Mathematica One-Liner Competition 2012:  “What can you do with one line of code?”  That is, in under 140 characters (making it tweetable).  Why, a Particle Zoo Calliope, of course! My entry (only slightly modified from that submitted):

SectorChart[
Button[{1, p[#, s]},
EmitSound@Sound@SoundNote@{2 p[#, s], Floor@p[#, "Mass"]^.3}]
/.s -> "Spin" & /@ ParticleData[] /. p -> ParticleData]

W00t! Received an Honorable Mention! (the competition was fierce, lots of good one-liners). Give it a try below. You will need the free Mathematica CDF plugin installed. A figure will be generated. It is a musical instrument. Click on different locations on the figure to play different intervals. The first click is sometimes a bit awkward/slow, but after that it should play in real time.


Description:
A sector plot is generated based on the spin of all the known elementary particles (quarks, leptons, and gauge bosons) and the hadronic bound states (bayrons and mesons). The length of the tine on the sector plot is proportional to the particle’s intrinsic spin. There are around 1000 particles in the database. When you click on one of the sectors, representing a particle, two tones are played based on the spin and the mass of that particle. The mapping from values to notes is arbitrary, but selected to be “listenable.” I take two times the particle’s spin as one note and the integer part of the particle’s mass to the 0.3 as the second (this was selected by trial and error to give a reasonable range of tones for the full particle mass spectrum). A value of “0” is considered middle C and each integer above and below is a half-step.