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?