Explorations by Nate Schwartz Jazz Orchestra

“Music does not influence research work, but both are nourished by the same sort of longing, and they complement one another in the release they offer.”

- Albert Einstein

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the largest, most complicated machine humanity has ever built. Its 17-mile ring tunnels underneath Geneva, Switzerland, and accelerates subatomic particles to 99.9% the speed of light before smashing them into one another. The image you see on the front of this album is a “photograph” of one of these engineered collisions, made by compiling data from the LHC’s ATLAS Experiment’s hundreds of detectors. Ten thousand scientists from over 100 countries have been working at LHC searching for the elusive Higgs Boson -- the particle predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics that supposedly gives atoms their mass (and consequently enables our existence, and the existence of all that we know).

I think this perfectly captures the complexity of our current moment in time. In the last 100 years, we’ve gone from struggling to get our first plane off the ground to landing on the moon, putting spacecraft in orbit around every other planet in the solar system, building invisible infrastructure that allows us to communicate with each other instantaneously across huge stretches of land & sea, and smashing particles together with so much energy that we just might get a glimpse of our physical reality’s most fundamental nature.

Through scientific inquiry and artistic exploration, we can attempt to make sense of the universe, and possibly learn more about our place in it. We won’t answer all of our big questions in our lifetime, but we have just two options on how to proceed: continue down our current path of making everything easier and cheaper, and engineering a more passive lifestyle for ourselves so we have more time to enjoy the plethora of “things” that we’ll purchase; or do some serious soul-searching and allow our collective imagination and instinctual optimism to conquer our fear of each other and of the unknown, so that we may live peacefully and with dignity as we boldly voyage to strange new worlds.


We can’t solve all the world’s problems, or even our own problems -- but the first step is exploration. So join us in our exploration of mind, of spirit, and of cosmos.


- Nate

LA's newest, freshest, youngest, most galactivated jazz orchestra. Allow us to take you on a journey through the cosmos...

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