Chapter 12 - Cosmology Song

A song for my A2 Physics students, covering some of the content in the cosmology chapter of the course. LYRICS: At the beginning of your second year You filled out feedback forms, giving us your ideas On how the physics course, might be improved We hope that you feel we have listened to you Now some of you may be wondering Why I have now decided to sing Well, would you believe that in another class Somebody had the audacity to ask for More musical numbers More physics sing-a-longs And so, for that reason, I've written you a song In chapter 12 we've taken a journey Through matter, space and time Unlocking the mystery of the Universe's history With a touch of relativity thanks to Albert Einstein The Universe is very large, the Universe is very old And although it is filled with stars, the Universe is very cold And much of outer space is just empty space And it keeps on expanding at an alarming pace. To calculate the speed at which the galaxies recede You can use Hubble's Law, v = Hd We live on a planet; it orbits a star The distance between them is pretty far But that's nothing in comparison to the distance to Proxima Centauri It takes over four years for its light to reach your eye The galaxy contains about 100 billion stars And there are about 100 billion galaxies like ours And if we look back far enough; 300,000 years after creation That is when we first see the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation Which is evidence for a Big Bang, Although it's not immediately apparent This relic radiation was formed When the Universe became transparent We looked at radar, we learned the facts We went outside to measure parallax Using a lightbulb and a ruler we saw That distant objects are dimmer, it's called the inverse square law We used computers to find the Hubble constant At times I talked a load of nonsense (this isn't actually true) Some homework tasks were hard, others were easy Many of my jokes, including this song, were pretty cheesey But keep asking questions, remain inquisitive Because asking questions is what physics is I hope you've enjoyed the start of your second year And have a lovely summer and drink lots of water And we look forward to seeing you back here For the remainder of the course in the autumn You can come back for more physics fun And if you're lucky/unlucky (delete as appropriate) another physics song But until then, have a great summer everyone