And Now for Something Completely Different...

November 13, 2008

This year's "Large Hadron Collider Rap" was a bona fide YouTube sensation. But singing songs about physics is a long, time-honored tradition that originated in England. At least that's what physics professor Walter Smith of Haverford College says. Smith runs what he describes as the premiere online collection of physics songs in the world. (You might snarkily observe that it is the only such collection. But you'd be wrong.)

The illustrious 19th century physicist James Clerk Maxwell -- author of the famous wave equations for light -- also composed alternate lyrics to the then-familiar folk song "Comin' Through the Rye," substituting the meeting of two young lovers with a rumination on the physics of collisions. By the early 20th century, Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory had made singalongs a tradition of their winter holiday parties, with participants like J.J. Thomson (who discovered the electron in 1897 and snagged a Nobel Prize for his trouble) standing on chairs and singing parodies at the top of their lungs. One assumes that copious pints of beer were involved.

Before he achieved national fame for his satirical ditties, Tom Lehrer was a physics grad student at Harvard, where he penned an entire musical show called The Physical Revue. (The title parodies a leading physics journal, The Physical Review.) And for the last couple of years, the American Physical Society (publisher of said Physical Review) has sponsored an evening physics singalong at its annual March meeting -- just as a way to unwind a bit after three full days spent juggling 15 different parallel technical sessions on everything from superfluidity and evolutionary dynamics to exotic nanostructures.

That's a scientific tradition with universal appeal, I think. Who can resist They Might Be Giants crooning, "The sun is a mass of incandescent gas..." -- not to mention the entire "Schoolhouse Rock" oeuvre? Although the gold standard, in my opinion, is Monty Python's "Galaxy Song":