He Only Loves His Collider

This picture (courtesy Wikipedia) is believed to be the first picture ever placed on the web. The subjects are believed to be the first band on the web. Ladies, Gentlemen, and the rest of you, I present Les Horribles Cernettes.

Sometime around the beginning of the Gayer Nineties (as in much more gay than the Gay Nineties), a young woman working as a secretary at the CERN labs in Switzerland was upset because the long shifts her physicist boyfriend was on were making it difficult for them to get together. To get his attention, she enlisted the help of Silvano de Gennaro, an analyst in the Computer Science department at CERN to write "Collider" a song about the perils of loving a high energy physicist. They performed it at the CERN Hardronic Festival to get his attention. The song was a hit and is now acclaimed as "the national anthem of high energy physics", at least according to the band. Speaking of the band, it formed subsequently around de Gennaro and took the name as a backronym from the initials of CERN's largest experiment, the soon to (finally) be completed Large Hadron Collider.

So why all this history, and where's the video? Keep yer shirt on, pilgrim, and let me 'splain. I don't think I can properly explain the current state of internet video without talking about what has gone before. So, from time to time I will be dredging up some hoary old internet artifact, probably in some obscure format (speaking of which you'll need Realplayer for this one).

So back to history. The CERNettes were a hit with the hard physics community, were invited to perform at all manner of Phyisics conferences, Nobel prize parties, and the World'92 Expo in Seville. AT the '92 Hardronic Festival they were seen by a guy named Tim Berners-Lee, who was working on something called a World Wide Web, whatever that was. After the show he asked de Gennaro for a few scanned photos of "The CERN girls" to publish on his web thingie. She later said "I had only a vague idea of what that was, but I scanned some photos on my Mac and FTPed them to Tim's now famous "info.cern.ch". How was I to know that I was passing an historical milestone, as the one above was the first picture ever to be clicked on in a web browser!"

So now on to the video. What I've dug up is a music video for "Collider", from the band's site complete with CERNettes in prom dresses do-wopping their way around what might be the largest physics lab in the world. And if that's not hot I don't know what is. And the video is... Here.