Tim Blais

Last updated
Tim Blais
Personal information
Born
Hudson, Quebec, Canada
NationalityCanadian
YouTube information
Channel
Years active2012–present
Genre(s) Educational film, popular science, educational entertainment
Subscribers334.00 thousand [1]
Total views26.16 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.

Contents

Early life and education

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]

Career

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.

Related Research Articles

In physics, the fundamental interactions or fundamental forces are the interactions that do not appear to be reducible to more basic interactions. There are four fundamental interactions known to exist:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elementary particle</span> Subatomic particle having no known substructure

In particle physics, an elementary particle or fundamental particle is a subatomic particle that is not composed of other particles. The Standard Model presently recognizes seventeen distinct particles—twelve fermions and five bosons. As a consequence of flavor and color combinations and antimatter, the fermions and bosons are known to have 48 and 13 variations, respectively. Among the 61 elementary particles embraced by the Standard Model number are electrons and other leptons, quarks, and the fundamental bosons. Subatomic particles such as protons or neutrons, which contain two or more elementary particles, are known as composite particles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Particle physics</span> Study of subatomic particles and forces

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bohemian Rhapsody</span> 1975 single by Queen

"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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Standard Model</span> Theory of forces and subatomic particles

The Standard Model of particle physics is the theory describing three of the four known fundamental forces in the universe and classifying all known elementary particles. It was developed in stages throughout the latter half of the 20th century, through the work of many scientists worldwide, with the current formulation being finalized in the mid-1970s upon experimental confirmation of the existence of quarks. Since then, proof of the top quark (1995), the tau neutrino (2000), and the Higgs boson (2012) have added further credence to the Standard Model. In addition, the Standard Model has predicted various properties of weak neutral currents and the W and Z bosons with great accuracy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Higgs</span> British theoretical physicist (1929–2024)

Peter Ware Higgs was a British theoretical physicist, professor at the University of Edinburgh, and Nobel laureate in Physics for his work on the mass of subatomic particles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gauge boson</span> Elementary particles that are force carriers

In particle physics, a gauge boson is a bosonic elementary particle that acts as the force carrier for elementary fermions. Elementary particles whose interactions are described by a gauge theory interact with each other by the exchange of gauge bosons, usually as virtual particles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lisa Randall</span> American theoretical physicist

Lisa Randall is an American theoretical physicist and Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University. Her research includes the fundamental forces of nature and dimensions of space. She studies the Standard Model, supersymmetry, possible solutions to the hierarchy problem concerning the relative weakness of gravity, cosmology of dimensions, baryogenesis, cosmological inflation, and dark matter. She contributed to the Randall–Sundrum model, first published in 1999 with Raman Sundrum.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lawrence Krauss</span> American particle physicist and cosmologist (born 1954)

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Holger Bech Nielsen</span> Danish physicist

Holger Bech Nielsen is a Danish theoretical physicist and professor emeritus at the Niels Bohr Institute, at the University of Copenhagen, where he started studying physics in 1961.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Ellis (physicist, born 1946)</span> British physicist

Jonathan Richard "John" Ellis is a British-Swiss theoretical physicist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Physics beyond the Standard Model</span> Theories trying to extend known physics

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gerald Guralnik</span>

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">François Englert</span> Belgian theoretical physicist

François, Baron Englert is a Belgian theoretical physicist and 2013 Nobel Prize laureate.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">C. R. Hagen</span>

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Higgs boson</span> Elementary particle involved with rest mass

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Don Lincoln</span> American physicist

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MinutePhysics</span> Educational YouTube channel

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.

<i>Bohemian Rhapsody</i> (film) 2018 biopic about Freddie Mercury

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.

References

  1. 1 2 "About acapellascience". YouTube.
  2. 1 2 Suen, Fan-Yee (September 28, 2013). "Bohemian Gravity: Canadian grad student uses music to explain string theory". ctvnews.ca. Retrieved November 23, 2018.
  3. 1 2 3 Hunter, Colin (March 9, 2016). "Watch this singer's super-catchy explanation of gravitational waves". insidetheperimeter.ca. Retrieved November 23, 2018.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 Mortillaro, Nicole (September 17, 2013). "Video: Using 'Bohemian Rhapsody' to explain the universe". globalnews.ca. Retrieved November 24, 2018.
  5. 1 2 Palus, Shannon. "Making a living on YouTube". McGillnews.mcgill.ca. Retrieved November 24, 2018.
  6. 1 2 "Physicist Tim Blais pays musical tribute to New Horizons, Pluto". ca.news.yahoo.com. July 13, 2015. Retrieved November 23, 2018.
  7. 1 2 Yang, Ethan (September 17, 2012). "Tim Blais on 'A Capella Science'". McGilldaily.com. Retrieved November 23, 2018.
  8. 1 2 3 "An evening with A Capella Science's Tim Blais". dailyhive.com. Retrieved November 23, 2018.[ permanent dead link ]
  9. "Physikalische Einheiten im Song". Sueddeutsche.de (in German). August 27, 2012. Retrieved November 27, 2018.
  10. "Higgs boson-inspired parody provides musical spin". arabnews.com. Agence France Presse. August 26, 2012. Retrieved November 23, 2018.
  11. Boyle, Alan (November 2, 2015). "Mamma mia! 'Bohemian Gravity' turns string theory into a viral video". nbcnews.com. Retrieved November 24, 2018.
  12. "A Capella Science". youtube.com. Retrieved November 25, 2018.
  13. Jardin, Lauren (January 21, 2017). "String theory + a capella: A Montrealer's formula for online fame". cbc.ca. Retrieved November 24, 2018.
  14. "NMC Artist in Residence", nmc.ca, retrieved November 23, 2018
  15. "Tim Blais NMC Artist in Residence", nmc.ca, retrieved November 23, 2018[ permanent dead link ]