Good music often provides the perfect background songs for our ordinary daily activities. Music also allows us to relive a story narrated by lyrics in our imagination or allows us to escape to the beats and sounds of different instruments. By making some songs very personal to us, we often forget to acknowledge the inspiration that made it possible for these songs to exist. Here at the Clog, we’re taking the time to acknowledge the meaning and inspiration that went behind some of today’s popular songs:

John Mayer’s “Gravity:” Mayer’s “Come Back to Bed” was actually an early attempt at creating “Gravity.” It took some time for him to actually put the words and instrumentals into a cohesive and powerful song. In a concert in December 2005, Mayer explained that “Gravity” is a song so important to him that he could listen to it for the rest of his life. When addressing where the song came from, he stated, “I was in LA, and I was there for the summer, just writing tunes, and I was in the shower. And I don’t know where it came from, but it’s the damn truth you know, and I just sang, ‘gravity…is working against me.’” He also expressed that “Gravity” took on a more significant meaning; this was a song about “making sure you still love yourself … making sure you still have your head on”.

Jason Mraz’s “The Remedy (I Won’t Worry):” Mraz’s musical remedy would not have been created if it wasn’t for his friend Charlie Mingroni. Mingroni was a close friend of Mraz’s who had cancer. This significantly impacted Mraz. When facing your own personal battles, Mraz sings that “the tragedy is how you’re gonna spend the rest of your nights with the light on.” This song was made to relax the mind and soul even through one’s hardest times.

Ed Sheeran’s “The A Team:” This song was inspired by a gig Sheeran did at a homeless shelter at the age of 18. When listening to people’s stories, Sheeran was fascinated by the extreme struggles that many faced. This was especially the case when discussing substance abuse. Drugs like cocaine, a “Class A drug,” had been discussed and served as the direct inspiration for the song’s title. In an effort to mask addressing the serious issue of substance abuse, Sheeran successfully attempted to make the song upbeat.

These artists show us that by taking inspiration as it comes and transforming it into art is something very powerful. By sharing something you personally created, you can offer someone else an interesting set of lens to look through.

What inspired a work of art that you’re proud of? Share with us in the comments!

Image source: Kia Clay under Creative Commons 

Contact Karen Kwaning at kkwaning@dailycal.org.

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Researchers at UC Berkeley are conducting experiments to see whether antimatter, which is made of antiparticles that have the same masses but opposite charges as particles of ordinary matter, can defy gravity.

Joel Fajans, a professor in the department of physics, is part of a team of researchers at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which used an apparatus known as ALPHA — Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus — to conduct a gravity experiment with molecules of hydrogen and its equal-but-opposite counterpart, antihydrogen.

Fajans said the experiment mimicked Galileo’s legendary theoretical Leaning Tower of Pisa, experiment in which two balls of different masses were dropped from the tower to demonstrate that their rates of descent were independent of their masses.

The ALPHA collaboration used the apparatus to catch antihydrogen atoms, hold them without letting them into contact and then dropped them to see which direction they fell.

According to Fajans, the experiment produced inconclusive results about the effects of gravity on antimatter. The team published its results in a paper on April 30.

He and Jonathan Wurtele, a professor in the department of physics and a member of the ALPHA collaboration, said that it would be very unlikely that antimatter defies gravity.

“If we somehow discovered that antimatter fell upwards, almost everything about our understanding of the universe would change,” Fajans said. “All of the laws of physics would be completely destroyed.”

Fajans and Wurtele said they originally intended for the ALPHA apparatus to learn more about the spectral lines and glow of atoms. However, they found the apparatus could also give them a way to test gravity’s effects on antimatter.

Physicists believe that matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts during the Big Bang, but they have been unable to find significant quantities of antimatter in nature. Fajans and Wurtele said that physicists have been speculating for decades that this could be explained by a theory that antimatter falls upward, and ALPHA gave them a way to finally test that theory.

But because of how unlikely it is that antimatter defies gravity, Fajans and Wurtele said that the experiment was more about ruling out the possibility than proving it was true.

“Even though antimatter and matter may seem like opposites, they both give off light in the same way and they both behave according to the laws of physics,” Wurtele said. “They just seem opposite in the way we understand them.”

Fajans and Wurtele said that next year, the ALPHA collaboration will repeat the gravity experiments with CERN’s new and improved ALPHA-2 apparatus, which uses lasers to measure antimatter.

CERN is an international organization made up of physicists and engineers whose goal is to discover and understand the “fundamental structure of the universe,” according to the organization’s website. The CERN laboratory, housed in Geneva, is the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, and it houses the world’s largest and most complex scientific instruments to study particles.

Pooja Mhatre is the lead research and ideas reporter. Contact her at pmhatre@dailycal.org.

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The chapter in my physics textbook on gravity is called “Newton’s Universe.”

Forget worldviews: Imagine having a perspective on the entire universe named in your honor hundreds of years after you’re dead, like you’ve singlehandedly redefined the right way to look at literally everything. That’s godlike.

But it’s apparently not the way Newton saw things.

“If I have seen further,” he is said to have written, “it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Those giants must have been exactly one Isaac Newton short of the plateau overlooking the panorama of the universe, a height I’m not yet far enough into physics to know how to measure.

Even though I can’t do the math, I like to imagine the way Newton might have felt as he made his way up to those shoulders, clamoring up over giant after giant through a seemingly endless procession of human ingenuity, making his way through the carefully accrued log of what our species knows about our universe.

And even more than that, I like to imagine the way Newton’s face might have looked when he finally reached that last set of shoulders, when he knew his own sturdy set would be the next rung in that human ladder, when he knew he knew something true that no one else had ever known before. I like to imagine the way the sight of that new universe splayed out in front of him, overwhelming in its brilliance, might have been reflected in his own face — whether his features registered a slow shock and then an unadulterated joy.

I feel very thankful for the giants who have broadened society’s collective perspective, and I especially like the way their work stacks up. I like the way that our campus is literally built on top of those stacks, that when we walk on Memorial Glade, we are standing on paper giants. I like the way books stack up against one another on their shelves, their ideas quietly pushing against each other through their leather bindings. I like that the paper on which this column will be printed will be one leaf in a very tiny part of that overwhelming chronicle.

I think this chronicle exists in more practical places as well. On Tuesday, I saw a photo of a Downtown Berkeley apartment building that was taken more than five years ago. I have a friend who currently lives in the apartment in the image, but it’s not the same person who took the photo. My friend is not the person who wanted to frame the apartment’s exterior with her camera to show that it was her space, to show that it had been her home while she went to school here.

But I’m sure my friend feels like that, too. I’m sure she also feels a connection to the apartment, a sense of ownership, that it feels very much hers.

I feel a connection to it as well. The photographer has moved away, but the building in the photo looks exactly the same, and even the lighting in the photo is something I recognize.

The two apartment-dwellers will probably never meet, will probably never even think of each other. The apartment’s landlord might have met them both, though. Or even if it’s a different landlord now, the new landlord might have met the old landlord or one landlord in the shoulder sequence who met that photographer a few years ago.

We are our own giants, too. We are the most recent iteration of a person constantly climbing the shoulders of past selves toward a plateau we dream will be as brilliant as Newton’s.

Sometimes, when I’m in the middle of working really hard for something, I am struck by a sense of clarity that feels a bit like how I imagine Newton’s new universe might have. Like maybe every edit I make to this piece means getting closer to enumerating something true about the world. Like finally, something is illuminated.

It would be naive to say that it is ever a straight climb, and it would be problematic to say that humans are on a clean trajectory toward progress.

But it’s true that we’re made of the stuff of the stars and that we stand on a library full of ancient thoughts that have yet to exhaust their potency, that my textbook speaks of “unifying natural motion on Earth and in the heavens” and that the sky we see is one passed down to us from times of varying degrees passed, old light and new light that’s come from light-åyears away before we can look up to it.

And there’s still something that rings true for me in a photo of an apartment I have almost no stake in other than the humanness of it — the humanness of this enormous sequence of which I am so, so thankful to be a part.

Contact Sarah Burns at sburns@dailycal.org or follow her on Twitter: @_SBurns.

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