Tim Blais | |
---|---|
Personal information | |
Born | |
Nationality | Canadian |
YouTube information | |
Channel | |
Years active | 2012–present |
Genre(s) | Educational film, popular science, educational entertainment |
Subscribers | 334.00 thousand [1] |
Total views | 26.16 million [1] |
Last updated: 9 Jul 2022 |
Tim Blais is a Canadian science communicator. He explains scientific topics via writing and performing a capella parodies of popular music which he records and posts on his YouTube channel, A Capella Science.
Blais was born in Hudson, Quebec. Blais states that he comes from an "incredibly musical" family. [2] His mother leads a church choir; Blais joined the choir when he was three. [3] He also plays drums, piano, and stringed instruments including guitar. [4] Blais graduated from McGill University in 2011 with a Bachelor of Science degree. [5] In 2013, he earned a master's degree in high-energy theoretical physics with honors [4] from McGill. [6]
Blais created his first parody video in 2012, motivated by a desire to help people understand the world around them. [4] He states that creating parody videos with a factual science theme came out of being fascinated by science, music (particularly a capella), and parody. [4] He was inspired by "Weird Al" Yankovic, Bill Nye, Mike Tompkins, and Vi Hart. [7] He was also inspired by the group The Maccabeats, an a cappella group that sings parodies of songs with replacement lyrics about Jewish themes. [4] Blais has had an a cappella singing experience with Vancouver's Acapocalypse group. [8]
In his solo videos, Blais performs all the tracks with his own voice, sometimes beat-boxing and creating brass sound effects. [6] Most videos take a few hundred hours to complete. [5]
Blais' first video parody was "Rolling in the Higgs", based on Adele's "Rolling in the Deep". The video was one of a handful of musical creations that followed the 2012 announcement of the discovery of a boson particle with Higgs-like characteristics. Blais' YouTube video generated over 17,000 hits in its first five days [9] and had almost 800 thousand views as of April 2017. [8] The video took Blais 60 hours to complete. [10] Blais' second video, "Bohemian Gravity," parodied Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" to explain string theory. The video features a sock puppet portraying Albert Einstein. [11] The work attracted the attention of Brian May, Queen's guitarist (who also holds a PhD degree in astrophysics), and May posted the video on his website. [2]
Blais' YouTube channel has covered such topics as entropic time, exoplanets, and the discovery of insulin as a treatment for diabetes. Blais has collaborated with Dianna Cowern and others. [12] Although Blais' career in science includes previous employment at the TRIUMF particle accelerator center in Vancouver, Canada, [7] Blais makes a living from creating his videos, [3] being supported by advertising revenue, sales of mp3s and posters, and contributions from fans via the Patreon website. [13]
Blais also does public talks which include performances of his creations and as well as discussions of science culture and his experiences as a science graduate student and an artist in new media. [8] In 2014, he was an artist-in-residence with the National Music Centre in Alberta, [14] during which he experimented with new sounds and recorded tracks for an album. [15] In 2015, he appeared on Canada's reality television program, Canada's Smartest Person , [3] in which he won his episode but lost in the season finale.
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Particle physics or high-energy physics is the study of fundamental particles and forces that constitute matter and radiation. The field also studies combinations of elementary particles up to the scale of protons and neutrons, while the study of combination of protons and neutrons is called nuclear physics.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" is a song by the British rock band Queen, released as the lead single from their fourth studio album, A Night at the Opera (1975). Written by lead singer Freddie Mercury, the song is a six-minute suite, notable for its lack of a refraining chorus and consisting of several sections: an intro, a ballad segment, an operatic passage, a hard rock part and a reflective coda. It is one of the few progressive rock songs of the 1970s to have proved accessible to a mainstream audience.
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Lawrence Maxwell Krauss is a Canadian-American theoretical physicist and cosmologist who taught at Arizona State University (ASU), Yale University, and Case Western Reserve University. He founded ASU's Origins Project in 2008 to investigate fundamental questions about the universe and served as the project's director.
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Physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM) refers to the theoretical developments needed to explain the deficiencies of the Standard Model, such as the inability to explain the fundamental parameters of the standard model, the strong CP problem, neutrino oscillations, matter–antimatter asymmetry, and the nature of dark matter and dark energy. Another problem lies within the mathematical framework of the Standard Model itself: the Standard Model is inconsistent with that of general relativity, and one or both theories break down under certain conditions, such as spacetime singularities like the Big Bang and black hole event horizons.
Gerald Stanford "Gerry" Guralnik was the Chancellor’s Professor of Physics at Brown University. In 1964 he co-discovered the Higgs mechanism and Higgs boson with C. R. Hagen and Tom Kibble (GHK). As part of Physical Review Letters' 50th anniversary celebration, the journal recognized this discovery as one of the milestone papers in PRL history. While widely considered to have authored the most complete of the early papers on the Higgs theory, GHK were controversially not included in the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics.
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Carl Richard Hagen is a professor of particle physics at the University of Rochester. He is most noted for his contributions to the Standard Model and Symmetry breaking as well as the 1964 co-discovery of the Higgs mechanism and Higgs boson with Gerald Guralnik and Tom Kibble (GHK). As part of Physical Review Letters 50th anniversary celebration, the journal recognized this discovery as one of the milestone papers in PRL history. While widely considered to have authored the most complete of the early papers on the Higgs theory, GHK were controversially not included in the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics.
The Higgs boson, sometimes called the Higgs particle, is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics produced by the quantum excitation of the Higgs field, one of the fields in particle physics theory. In the Standard Model, the Higgs particle is a massive scalar boson with zero spin, even (positive) parity, no electric charge, and no colour charge that couples to mass. It is also very unstable, decaying into other particles almost immediately upon generation.
Don Lincoln is an American physicist, author, host of the YouTube channel Fermilab, and science communicator. He conducts research in particle physics at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and was an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame, although he is no longer affiliated with the university. He received a Ph.D. in experimental particle physics from Rice University in 1994. In 1995, he was a co-discoverer of the top quark. He has co-authored hundreds of research papers, and more recently, was a member of the team that discovered the Higgs boson in 2012.
MinutePhysics is an educational YouTube channel created by Henry Reich in 2011. The channel's videos use whiteboard animation to explain physics-related topics. Early videos on the channel were approximately one minute long. As of March 2024, the channel has over 5.7 million subscribers.
Bohemian Rhapsody is a 2018 biographical musical drama film that focuses on the life of Freddie Mercury, the lead singer of the British rock band Queen, from the formation of the band in 1970 to their 1985 Live Aid performance at the original Wembley Stadium. It was directed by Bryan Singer from a screenplay by Anthony McCarten, and produced by Graham King and Queen manager Jim Beach. It stars Rami Malek as Mercury, with Lucy Boynton, Gwilym Lee, Ben Hardy, Joe Mazzello, Aidan Gillen, Tom Hollander, and Mike Myers in supporting roles. Queen members Brian May and Roger Taylor also served as consultants. A British-American venture, it was produced by Regency Enterprises, GK Films and Queen Films, and was distributed by 20th Century Fox.