A 2 minute 27 second hip-hop song about what is below the atom: protons and neutrons are made of quarks, held together by gluons. Animated physics diagrams play behind karaoke lyrics.
quarks-song.mp4: the video, 1920×1080, with lyrics drawn on screen.quarks-song.srt: the lyrics as subtitles.
What the song says
| Part | Topic |
|---|---|
| Intro | We go one level deeper than the atom. |
| Verse 1 | The size ladder from cell to quark. If an atom were a stadium, its nucleus would be a pea; the rest is mostly empty space. Protons and neutrons are each made of three quarks. Electrons are not: no smaller parts have ever been found inside them. |
| Chorus | Up, up, down is a proton. Up, down, down is a neutron. The three quarks are locked inside. |
| Verse 2 | Quark charges come in thirds: up is +2/3, down is −1/3, so a proton adds up to +1 and a neutron to 0. Quarks also carry "color charge" (red, green, blue), which is a name for the strong-force charge, not a real color. Gluons carry the strong force and act like a rubber band: the farther apart, the more energy it takes. Pull hard enough and the energy makes a new quark and antiquark, so a quark is never seen alone. |
| Verse 3 | Six flavors: up, down, charm, strange, top, bottom. Everyday matter uses only up and down; the heavier four decay almost instantly. The three quarks' own masses are only about 1% of a proton's mass. The rest is the energy of the quarks and gluons moving inside (E = mc²), so most of your own mass is that energy. |
Sources checked
- Quarks make up about 1% of the proton's mass, the rest coming from the motion and confinement of quarks and gluons: Dissecting the Mass of the Proton (APS Physics, 2018), How are the quarks moving? (CMS, CERN).
- Three colors, confinement, string breaking into new quark–antiquark pairs, and the top quark decaying before it can form a particle: Quantum Chromodynamics review (Particle Data Group, 2020).
The quark charges, the six flavors, the stadium-and-pea comparison, the sizes on the ladder (cell ~10⁻⁵ m down to proton ~10⁻¹⁵ m), and the mass ratios on the flavor cards (relative to the up quark, from PDG quark masses: down ~2×, strange ~40×, charm ~600×, bottom ~2,000×, top ~80,000×) are standard textbook values. They were not checked against a specific source for this video. The "~99% of your mass" card follows from the 1% figure, since almost all of your mass is in protons and neutrons.
How it is made (src/)
This uses the same pipeline as videos/polyphenols-song/.
lyrics.json: the lyrics, the bar each line starts on, the tempo (84 BPM), and the chorus melodies.build_audio.py: makes the voice with Microsoft Edge TTS (en-US-AndrewMultilingualNeural) and places each line on the bar grid, speeding up a line with ffmpegatempowhen it is too long for its bar. Chorus lines are re-pitched to the melody, one note per syllable, with the WORLD vocoder (pyworld), plus a harmony a third below. The beat (drums, bass, pad, and arpeggio) is synthesized with numpy. It writessong.wav,timeline.json(start and end times for every word), andsong.srt.scene.html: draws every frame on a canvas fromrender(t)andtimeline.json. Fonts are Fredoka and Inter from Google Fonts, plus Noto Color Emoji.render.mjs: rendersscene.htmlframe by frame at 24 fps with headless Chrome (8 pages in parallel) and pipes the frames to ffmpeg.build.sh: runs all of the above and writes the MP4 and SRT here.
CHROME=/path/to/chrome src/build.sh
It needs uv, ffmpeg, Node, and network access for Edge TTS and Google Fonts. Intermediate files go to $OUT (default /tmp/quarks).