It's not all microscopes and lab coats at the Higgs boson headquarters on the Swiss-French border.
Well, it is, but there's also some art going on. Just last week a group of scientists at CERN -- the European Organization for Nuclear Research -- which houses the Hadron Collider that discovered the Higgs boson, set the God particle to music.
Since you can't experience the Higgs boson firsthand, the scientists thought it'd be cool to form music notation out of the data, and apparently the particle that may have produced the universe as we know it (or not) sounds like a snazzy piano tune. Obviously.
But Arts@CERN, which is dedicated to providing those hard-working scientists with a little culture, isn't stopping there. They also commissioned choreographer Gilles Jobin to come to the CERN campus for three months and produce a dance piece in CERN's library. It's the God Particle Dancers, ladies and gentlemen.
"When I first came here," Jobin told The Guardian, "I didn't know much about physics and even less about particle physics. It has taken me a month to understand what's going on."
Us, too, Jobin. Us too. The work he created -- called "Strangels" -- attempts to mirror the way that "time stands still" on the hushed CERN campus, and he placed dancers in eerie, contorted shapes around the library.
WATCH the "Strangels" dancers:
As The Guardian reported, a lot of the scientists didn't bat an eyelash at the production, while "others gave one look and carried on working." Some, however, said they were "touched" by it.
CERN is dedicated to bringing artists from around the world to the headquarters.
"Particle physics and the arts are inextricably linked," their mission states. "Both are ways to explore our existence – what it is to be human and our place in the universe."
In the coming months, as part of CERN's other artist residency projects, there will be seminars and presentations from photographers, digital artists, filmmakers and sculptors.
WATCH a simple(ish) explanation of the Higgs boson.