Tim Blais, 23, had an unusual personal project last year while he worked on his master’s thesis in physics at McGill University in Montreal: making a capella exploration of string theory on YouTube. “Bohemian Gravity,” as he calls it, is sung to the tune of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” and has gone viral online, racking up more than 867,000 views on YouTube since being posted on 16 September. Impeccably arranged and edited, the parody shows Blais singing in harmony with himself, featuring lyrics like “Space is a pure void / Why should it be stringy? / Because it's quantum not classical / Nonrenormalizable.” Blais, who sings and plays several instruments, says now that he’s graduated he wants to pursue life as a musician, though he’s considering other science themed videos in the future. Among the hundreds of online mentions of the video he’s most proud of one from astrophysicist Brian May, the Queen guitarist, who linked to it on his blog.



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