Ongoing History Daily: The world’s most expensive musical instrument?

Question: What is the most expensive musical instrument in the world? No, it’s not some Stradivarius violin or a rare Beatles guitar. It’s the Large Hadron Collider.

Wait—the big machine in France and Switzerland that’s exploring the mysteries of the subatomic world? That’s right.

There’s a web app that grabs data from experiments being conducted on the machine and turns it into music.  It’s called Quantizer (a name that makes sense on soooo many geeky levels) and is the project of a couple of students. Once the app grabs the data, it cleans it up and maps it as musical notes. After that, you can choose to turn it into specific kinds of music.

Cool, huh? Not a bad use for a machine that costs about $15 billion.