Quart - A Quantum Comedy Song
Channel: Jess Hill
Date: 2022-12-21

This is a song composed by Amy Treloar and myself for entry in an ARC EQUS (Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems) competition in 2020.

You can watch the original with music video and more screaming here: https://youtu.be/BODtRtI4__o

It came with a pretentious blurb, which you can read below.

Pretentious Blurb

Our artwork 'Quart' is about quarks, in their finite variety. It portrays them as they are experienced by a young physics student. The opening of the video is a portrait of the different quarks, up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom. It shows their properties, such as their mass; with top and bottom quarks are the most massive. The quarks' quirky and charming names initially delight the new student. From lightest to heaviest, the quarks dance, spinning (but not really), brightly coloured (but...not really). The student becomes confused. Their thoughts chase each other round and round, echoing through their mind. Their world is shaken, they are unmoored. They do not understand. They scream in frustration and terror.

This piece of art is about the fundamental uncertainty within our universe. The world of quantum is so counterintuitive, bizarre, and seemingly completely incomprehensible. We strive for knowledge, knowing all the while that it is unattainable, that we will never understand. In the hope that the people of the future will know more than us, we continue to learn, to study, despite everything. Just like life, we will never comprehend the universe. We are creatures made of that which we cannot know. Our lives seem senseless, and yet we persist, screaming all the while, whether or not anyone ever hears.

Despite this, there is hope. So many ways we could die, individually and as a race, but we stubbornly keep living. Living in the hope that what we accomplish in our lifetime may benefit someone, now or in the future. Why, if we truly believed that life was meaningless? Why, if we held out no hope of humans surviving into the future? Why do we keep struggling for unobtainable knowledge, if not in the hope that someone, someday, will obtain it?

This artwork is for everyone who feels that life truly is meaningless; a reminder that no matter how strange the quarks, or how dark the night, there is hope.

And for all physicists, physics students, and educators, forever seeking the truth behind the universe.