Einstein and Vaudeville: The Path Not Taken

[beamjockey]

I was reading a discussion about musicians who went into astronomy and physics over at "Bad Astronomy."

I've always been impressed by a small thing I once read in Ronald W. Clark's Einstein: The Life and Times. Albert Einstein, and relativity, became famous rather suddenly in 1919 when Eddington's solar-eclipse observations confirmed the predicted bending of light by the Sun's gravitation. There was great public interest in relativity, and listeners flocked to hear physicists and astronomers lecture about it. Clark writes:

If all this was explicable in terms of an important new scientific theory which had become the common coin of intelligent conversation, Einstein was also raised to the far less comprehensible position of a popular celebrity. From London the Palladium music hall asked whether he would appear, virtually at his own figure, for a three-week "performance."

If a physicist of Einstein's stature had agreed to appear for three weeks at a music hall, the course of science might have changed.

In my daydreams, Einstein offers a little relativity, a couple of violin tunes, a little more relativity.

Vaudeville venues begin to book other scientists, who mix entertainment with education. Choral chemists. Piano-pounding paleontologists. Jitterbugging geologists. Tumbling taxonomists.

Eventually, it's commonly expected that a scientist will be able to present science to wide audiences. Large subsets of the public are well-versed in various disciplines, and scientific controversies are kicked around by taverngoers and subway-riders. No ivory towers here...

Comments

[mbcrui.livejournal.com]

Think of where things like the evolution 'controversy' would be if people actually understood the basis of the theory (and about what a theory *is*) instead of the spin that each side puts on the theory...

I have no problems at all with the popularization of science-- isn't that what Carl Sagan did?

[timill]

...and then there's Alexander Borodin...

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Until one day there was a particle physicist who played a ukulele...

[archiver-tim.livejournal.com]

Maybe the filk room would have been invented sooner. Invented is an akward term, 'came into being' would be better.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Argh. You've got me thinking of Yahoo Serious as Young Einstein.

[charlie-meadows.livejournal.com]

The one I know of is Hale Bradt, X-ray astronomer, who majored in music as an undergraduate at Princeton [ http://web.mit.edu/physics/giving/profiles/bradt.html ].

But he made the jump in 1955. About a generation later, it would be close to unimaginable for an arts major to get into a graduate program in physics or astronomy...


I believe at least a couple of the better-known physicists of the late-19th and early-20th Century were accomplished "classical" pianists (I want to say Planck and Born, but I'd need to check my memory on this).