From the Fall 2009 issue of Cold Facts: CERN on the The Daily Show, NASA on The Colbert Report, outreach raps for the LHC, the Tevatron and FRIB, Japanese Manga art “edutainment” for KEK, standup comedy on the helium shortage, the Australian Science Agency teaming up on a science takeoff of a Backstreet Boys’ song, hundreds of songs from a wide variety of artists with science themes such as Beck’s “Gamma Ray,” and particle physics plush toys.
What’s become of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) as boring, nerds-only pursuits? What does this mean for those of us involved in these fields? Can it really be that we are moving toward the mainstream? And is that good or bad?
These are some of the questions that have come to mind in response to incoming emails, blogs, magazine articles and online newsletters pointing to a trend of STEM becoming “cool.” Our first reaction has been disbelief, followed by delight and even, dare we say it, hope. Hope that maybe nerds are “in”!
Our first hint of this trend was MSU/CERN science writer Kate McAlpine’s “Large Hadron Rap,” which shot to the top of the YouTube charts with 5 million hits last year.
Here’s a sample: “When LHCb sees where the antimatter’s gone_ALICE looks at collisions of lead ions_CMS and ATLAS are two of a kind_They’re looking for whatever new particles they can find._The LHC accelerates the protons and the lead_And the things that it discovers will rock you in the head.”
Next McAlpine turned to nuclear physics with a rap on the new $550 million Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (CSA Corporate Sustaining Member) at MSU.
The refrain: “They’re building FRIB with mysteries to solve_Like what reactions drive stars and how do they evolve_The strong force binds nuclei but we still can’t say_Exactly why some are stable while others decay_A more powerful machine can push the frontier_The physicists here, they get nuclear.”
McAlpine, known as “Alpinekat,” is presently working on a Black Hole rap.
Not to be outdone, Fermilab has its own rapper, Steven Rush, aka Funky49, who produced “Particle Business.” The “hook”: “rock stars of physics, particle business_smash matter, antimatter and witness_quarks, bottom to top they don’t stop_’where Higgs at?’ yo that’s their mark_where the Higgs at? x3 go go go!”
In response to the predictors of doom from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), “news” anchor John Oliver of The Daily Show, the half-hour cable TV program hosted by Jon Stewart that takes satirical aim at current news events, spent a day at the European particle physics laboratory learning about the collider.
As reported by Tona Kunz in symmetrybreaking, May 1, 2009, in true Daily Show form, Oliver questioned whether the LHC is a doomsday machine or a tool to answer the most fundamental questions in the universe, including why the world has structure and isn’t a big blob of free-floating energy.
Oliver roamed the laboratory’s tunnels between Switzerland and France, studying the shiny metal detectors, engaged in a battle of wits with CERN theorist John Ellis and hunkered down for the end of the world with high school science teacher Walter Wagner, who filed a lawsuit in a Hawaii court to stop the LHC. The nearly six-minute segment aired April 30.
Stephen Colbert’s show featured his long-running quest to have a new space module named for him. After the comedian came out on top of NASA’s online naming poll after urging viewers to enter his name through a write-in option and amassing more than 230,000 votes to beat out second-place name, “Serenity,” the space agency named a treadmill on the module for him. The module was eventually named Leonardo and was carried by the Space Shuttle Discovery to the International Space Station.
Also aboard Leonardo was an unusual object packed in Swedish astronaut Christer Fuglesang’s belongings: a theoretical particle called a Neutralino. Of course, Fugelsang didn’t bring a real neutralino, but a soft toy, Plushie, version. A former CERN physicist, Fugelsang wanted to take something representing CERN up to space on his mission. He chose the neutralino because it links together astrophysics and particle physics. In particle physics, the neutralino is a hypothetical particle, one of many predicted by supersymmetric theories. [Nancy Atkinson, Universe Today.]
Particle Plushie designer Julie Peasley has visited the CMS experiment at CERN and the CDF experiment at Fermilab. Heidi Schellman, a professor at Northwestern University who works with the DZero collaboration, commissioned Peasley to create a strange bottom meson plushie as a gift to her graduate students. She also commissioned a single top quark when its discovery was announced in March by DZero and CDF scientists at Fermi. Peasley has also created theorized particles, including the Higgs boson and antiparticles. She also has a new astrophysics line. [Tona Kunz, symmetrybreaking]
A striking cover from the August 09 issue of symmetry magazine, a joint Fermilab/SLAC publication, features artwork by Manga artist Takuya Uruno, based on an edutainment Web series he created for KEK. The cover incorporates a superconducting radio frequency cavity, string theory and a Van de Graaff generator, whose static electricity fluffs up the hair of a girl in the graphic. The art is an example of popular culture coming into contact with STEM—very successfully. (This graphic is incorporated in our cover and seen in detail on page 38.)
Recently The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, Australia’s national science agency, has teamed with Sydney University’s Science Revue to release a takeoff on the Backstreet Boys’ hit single, “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back).”
In a music video, they feature “Chem,” “Bio,” “Psych,” Phys” and “Maths,” and replaced “everybody” with climatology, oceanography, and a whole list of “-ography”s. Michael Banks, in his blog at physicsworld.com, says they “have upped the ante for science/geeky songs…My favorite bit is when ‘Maths’ appears wearing a chain around his neck with a rather large pi symbol attached to it, singing the words ‘Am I irrational.’”
symmetrybreaking also reports on a five-minute talk by science comedian Brian Malow on how a helium shortage would affect high-energy physics. As part of O’Reilly Media’s Ignite Show, a program with the slogan “Enlighten us, but make it quick,” Malow accepted the challenge to deliver a sharp, short and witty talk on the world’s dwindling helium supply in front of a live audience.
The Ignite concept allows each presenter exactly five minutes and 20 slides to talk about some subject of “geek culture.” The slides are set to change every 15 seconds, whether a speaker is ready or not. This pushes some speakers to the edge of a furious babble to keep within the time limit. Malow handles the pressure expertly in his helium presentation, available for viewing at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VN2-_5y_Vvw. As symmetry editor David Harris says in his blog about Malow, “all physics lectures should be so funny.”
Rachel Carr in symmetry, August 21, suggests we can “groove to the physics mix tape.” Besides the Beck “Gamma Ray” single, she documents an amazingly long list of songs by many top artists and some little-known ones, all taking their cues from physics.
There are even four bands with the name Dark Matter and others called Ingrid Lucia and the Flying Neutrinos, Math and Physics Club and We Are Scientists, for example. Mary Abraham combines physics and love in the song “Entropy,” in which she sings, “You give me light, you give me heat, but you never give me warmth.” Carr concludes that we should have faith in “the awesome power of physics to inspire.”
