Big Bang project gets rap treatment on Internet

By Robert Evans

GENEVA (Reuters) - A project to re-enact the "Big Bang" at CERN near Geneva on Wednesday is getting the rap treatment on the Internet from a group of young people working there.

"Twenty seven kilometres, a tunnel underground

"Designed with a mind to send protons around

"A circle that crosses through Switzerland and France

"Sixty nations contribute to scientific advance," it runs.

The nearly five-minute video has been a big hit on YouTube (www.youtube.com) and some other sites (www.vimeo.com and www.teachertube.com), far more than the 23-year-old American would-be science writer who wrote the words ever expected.

"It had an educational purpose. I thought it might make it into a few physics classrooms and perhaps be picked by some people randomly on line," says Kate MacAlpine -- rap name Alpinekat -- who is a trainee at CERN.

The video, largely filmed in CERN's vast underground caverns along the Franco-Swiss border, explains for the uninitiated the high-profile project around the gigantic Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, running round a 27 km (17-mile) tunnel.