Just to ease the mental anguish inflicted by the "science of homeopathy" video, here's a fantastic musical mashup called "We Are All Connected" -- not in any vague, New Age-y way, just by the fact that we're all made of "star stuff" forged in the explosions of supernovae, as Carl Sagan so eloquently put it when Cosmos first hit the airwaves. Sagan and Cosmos are sampled, naturally, along with Bill Nye the Science Guy, astrophysicst Neil de Grasse Tyson, the History Channel's Universe series, and a set of 1983 interviews with the late Richard Feynman. Get your physics groove on!
Science inspires art in all kinds of surprising ways. An article in SEED last week focused on a new opera by Spanish composer Hector Parra, that debuted earlier this year in Paris: Hypermusic Prologue. The work was inspired by theoretical physicist Lisa Randall's popular science book, Warped Passages. The son of a physicist, Parra read the book and became fascinated by Randall's description of how hidden dimensions might explain why, for example, the gravitational force seems so much weaker than the other fundamental forces. And he approached her about writing a libretto for his new opera.
Parra's opera is decidedly modern, with an experimental score, as befitting such cutting-edge physics theories. There are only two roles and minimalist, abstract stage design by artist Matthew Ritchie -- apparently he makes sculptures inspired by inflationary universe theory, so Hypermusic Prologue was a natural fit for his talents.
Randall's book describes her seminal work with fellow physicist Raman Sundrum on model-building -- developing testable mini-theories of higher dimensions in the universe, rather than shooting for a full-fledged Theory of Everything, as with conventional string theory (as if string theory could ever be described as fully conventional).
String theory imagines extra dimensions -- beyond the three spatial and one temporal dimension that make up the observable fabric of space-time -- that are large, perhaps even the size of a universe, rather than tiny curled up extra dimensions the smallest possible Planck scale? Randall and Sundrum propose a model in which our universe is the usual four-dimensional brane (short for "membranes," and in this context describing surfaces that exist in higher dimensional space). The twist: that brane exists on the surface of a five-dimensional space. Gravity is the only force that is not limited to the four-dimensional brane-world. It can seep into the higher dimension(s) as well, thus making it seem weaker than the other forces.
These are heady concepts, and they make for a heady opera. Randall's libretto employs the notion of extra dimensions as a metaphor for "another view" that is "hidden yet true." Parra's score, meanwhile, uses sounds and instruments to evoke warped spacetime and changes in energy, mass, time and gravity. Per the SEED article:
"As the soprano approaches a gravitationally strong part of the universe, for example, her voice is electronically treated to make her phrases shorter in mathematically precise increments and the orchestra matches this shorter phrasing. As she enters a hidden fifth dimension, her voice gets louder and the music gets sonically richer, while Bobby's [the baritone, James Bobby's] voice -- stuck in the lower-dimensional universe -- remains digitally untreated and becomes softer and thinner."
Barcelona will host a run of Hypermusic Prologue, and from there it will tour Luxembourg and Brussels. Look for a special adaptation to come to New York's Guggenheim Museum in January.
Quirky pop band They Might Be Giants have come a long way from playing underground clubs on New York City's Lower East Side, having been featured on MTV and penning the title song for the TV sitcom Malcolm in the Middle. They've also delved into the world of children's music, releasing Here Come the ABCs in 2005 and Here Come the 123s in 2008 in DVD/CD sets. And how they're all set to releaseHere Comes Science, with catchy tunes about the periodic table, photosynthesis, the planets, the color spectrum and more.
It seems like a natural venue for TMBG's John Flansburgh and John Linnell, since one of their best-known tunes is "Why Does the Sun Shine?", containing the immortal lyrics, "Oh, the sun is a mass of incandescent gas/A giant nuclear furnace..."
Well, it turns out that science has come a long way since the tune was originally written (by Tom Glazer, not by TMBG, who covered it). So they've updated the tune for the new children's album, "Why Does the Sun _Really_ Shine?" The critical change in the lyrics: "Oh, the sun is a miasma of incandescent plasma..." Hmmm. I'm not convinced it scans quite as well. This might be an argument for taking the occasional liberty with the science for artistic purposes.
Still, since it is an educational album, it's probably a good thing the two Johns hired Eric Siegel of the New York Hall of Science -- a children's museum in Queens -- to vet the lyrics for the upcoming DVD/CD set. Per Flansburgh: "Frankly, I was a terrible science student in high school. My last memory of the periodic table was right before I lost consciousness."
The tantalizing song titles include "Meet the Elements," "Roy G. Biv," "Photo Synthesis," "Speed and Velocity," and my personal favorite, "The Ballad of Davy Crockett in Outer Space." That's already been making the rounds of YouTube, and the adventures of everyone's favorite buckskin astronaut is well worth including here:
Next month marks the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, when NASA astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin boarded the lunar module and took one small step for man on the surface of the moon. There are lots of activities planned to commemorate this historic event, but Aldrin's taken a distinctly quirkier approach: he's made a hip-hop video with Snoop Dogg and Talib Kweli (of Black Star fame), with the proceeds going to benefit various space exploration foundations.
Even better, Funny or Die got into the act and made a tongue-firmly-in-cheek "Behind the Scenes" video about the making of "Rocket Experience," featuring numerous rappers giving Aldrin a few tips, and talking about the moon landing's impact on their lives. (Check out Snoop Dogg's lyrical rap tribute to Buzz at the very end.) Per Kweli: "Buzz Aldrin got his bars up!"
And now, for your listening pleasure, here's Buzz Aldrin -- a.k.a."Doc Rendezvous" -- in the final video cut for "Rocket Experience," directed by none other than McG (Terminator: Salvation):
There's a whiff of dark energy in the air this week, permeating the cultural zeitgeist. First, our new fearless leader here at Discovery Space, Ian O'Neill, has a terrific IM interview up with Dr. Richard Orbousy about the latter's master plan for harnessing dark energy to build a futuristic warp drive. Because wormholes are just so 2007, ya'll. Sure, it'll take the energy equivalent of the entire mass of Jupiter -- or, according to less optimistic calculations, 1 trillion Jupiters -- but that's just a technology problem.
Second, physics blogger Andrew Jaffe over at Leaves on the Line reports on the final exam results for his latest crop of graduate students. Apparently said students grappled mightily with the problem of the cosmological constant -- a leading candidate to explain this bizarre phenomenon of dark energy that is causing our universe to accelerate at an ever-faster rate. Per Andrew:
There was one question that almost all students got wrong, however. I asked about the “Cosmological Constant Problem” and whether it could be solved by the theory of cosmic inflation. The Cosmological Constant is a number that appears in General Relativity, and, although we can’t predict it for certain, we are pretty sure that if it’s not strictly zero, in most theories we would estimate that it ought to have a value something like 10<120> (that is 1 followed by 120 zeros!) times greater than that observed in the Universe today. ... Inflation involves something very much like the cosmological constant, but occurring in the very early Universe — so inflation can’t help us with the 120 zeroes, alas.
He ends with an amusing YouTube video of his colleague, Lloyd Knox, a physics professor at the University of California, Davis, who penned a little ditty about dark energy to help his own students with the cosmological conundrum. (h/t: Sean Carroll, via Twitter) Granted, I doubt Professor Knox will be wowing Simon Cowell on American Idol any time soon, but can this season's winner, Kris Allen, come up with lyrics like this?
What is causing this rush? This late great cosmic flush, hurtling all things apart Cosmo constant, scalar field, No compelling theories yield To the best of our creative and daring minds Young and bright Who strain, and reach, and struggle to know why
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":
Back in August, I wrote about gravitational waves -- those ripples in the fabric of spacetime produced by violent events in the distant universe -- in the context of some recent findings by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Now composer, conductor, percussionist and video artist Andrea Centazzo has put together a solo multimedia musical performance piece, Einstein's Cosmic Messengers, celebrating the quest for gravitational waves. And the world premiere takes place next Thursday, October 30, at 8 PM, at Caltech's Beckman Auditorium. Woo-hoo!
Those in the Los Angeles area might want to head on over for the performance, which will also feature two brief public lectures: on by Caltech's own black hole/gravity expert, Kip Thorne, on "The Warped Side of the Universe," -- I loved Black Holes and Time Warps, along with so many others -- and the second by LIGO's executive director, Jay Marx, "Listening for Ripples in Spacetime" (because that's essentially what LIGO does).
The musical portion of the evening is a five-part "suite," if you will, combining acoustic and digital images accompanied by video imagery -- some of it original, filmed in such locations as the recently restored theater of San Giovanni near Bologna, Italy, and the 13th century Castel del Montea in Apulia, Italy. Other imagery is draw from astronomical data and computer animations. The grand finale -- "Inspiral, Merger and Ringdown" -- features the life of a black-hole binary system; the instruments are based on the actual gravitational waveforms of such a system, transposed into audible sounds. Check it out:
I especially like the big swirling iris turning into a rotating black hole binary system, whirling faster and faster as it contracts, much like how the water in a flushing toilet spins around the center of the bowl, rotating faster and faster the closer it gets to the center. That said, the final scene calls to mind the fiery all-seeing eye of Sauron.
I should add that collaborating with Centazzo was theoretical physicist Michele Vallisneri of nearvy Jet Propulsion Lab. Vallisneri is a member of the LIGO collaboration and studies gravitational waves, but he is also intrigued by the "creative interface of science and art, as explored through music, visualization, and computer programs," according to his bio. Kudos to him for straddling the infamous "two cultures." I'm looking forward to the Big Premiere. Maybe we'll see you there!
Via Steinn of Dynamics of Cats comes this groovy "Astrobiology Rap" video by one Oort Kuiper (alter ego of Jonathan Chase, who penned the rap for the Astrobiology Network). Astrobiology, as Kuiper explains, is the study of life beyond our Big Blue Planet: "Study life on Earth, then you're doin' biology/ But when it's in space, it's called astrobiology...." There's lots of nifty references in the video to cultural icons of the space age, including SETI, the infamous "WOW!" signal, Sputnik, and a cameo by the late Carl Sagan. But my favorite part is the dancing green alien...
When NASA finally launched the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) on June 11, the Kennedy Space Center in Florida celebrated with a unique event: the world premiere of a musical piece composed specifically in honor of the mission, performed by the American Brass Quintet. The GLAST Prelude, for brass quintet is the creation of classical composer Nolan Gasser, whose other work includes 3 Jazz Preludes, for piano, and a four-part symphonic oratorio, American Festivals.
It's a rare composer these days who finds inspiration from a NASA space mission -- really, Gustav Holst's The Planets is the only example that springs immediately to mind, and that was quite awhile ago. Sure, Gasser earned a PhD in musicology from Stanford, specializing in medieval and renaissance music history (by far my favorite periods). But he also has some serious tech-savvy chops. For starters, he is artistic director of Classical Archives, the largest classical music site on the Web.
Gasser is also the chief musical architect of the Music Genome Project. That's the musical technology behind the Pandora personalized radio Web application, which now has some 10 million subscribers. For all who chafe at commercial radio -- the limited playlists, too-frequent ads, and constant squawking of radio DJs desperately trying to measure up to the shock-jocks of yesteryear -- Pandora is a dream come true.
The GLAST Prelude is just a multimedia sonic appetizer, however. Gasser is working on a second, much more ambitious composition inspired by GLAST, called Cosmic Reflection. The longer piece will also be a multimedia project, featuring images from the GLAST mission set to full orchestra and narration. The scope is huge: nothing less than replaying the entire 13.7 billion year history of the universe in a mere 40 minutes, with a libretto penned by none other than Case Western physicist Lawrence Krauss (perhaps best known as the author of The Physics of Star Trek).
Frankly, the thought of letting a physicist loose onto a poor unsuspecting libretto makes me shudder with trepidation. Creating a compelling work of art often requires playing a bit fast and loose with key facts, which is anathema to most physicists. But Krauss will be aided in this endeavor by Pierre Schwob, CEO of Classical Archives, who has both a musical background and is something of an amateur cosmologist. So the chances of creating something artistically beautiful that won't set the scientists' teeth on edge are far better.
We'll be able to see, and hear, for ourselves what Gasser and the GLAST folk come up with next fall, when Cosmic Reflections makes its world premiere at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC -- part of a scientific symposium presenting the first of results from the GLAST mission. In the meantime, have a listen to The GLAST Prelude yourself: it's available for download in various formsts here. [h/t: Science Fair]
Photo: Artist's rendering of GLAST in orbit around Earth. Source: NASA/General Dynamics C4 Systems
Jennifer Ouellette is the author of "Black Bodies and Quantum Cats: Tales from the Annals of Physics" and "The Physics of the Buffyverse", holds a black belt in jujitsu, and lives in Los Angeles with a tall cosmologist named Sean.
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