The Chronicle of Higher Education

From the issue dated April 2, 1999

A Centennial Celebration of Physics Brings Out the Discipline's Human Side
Abandoning their somewhat stodgy image, physical society's scientists show
they also want to have some fun

By KIM A. McDONALD

Atlanta

When more than 10,000 physicists arrived here last
week for the centennial meeting of the American
Physical Society -- an event billed as the largest
gathering of physicists in history -- they not
only sold out the rooms in every major hotel in
town.

They also showed the public that the practitioners
of their discipline are not necessarily the nerdy,
quirky, stuffy, somewhat elitist academics that
people usually envision inhabiting university
campuses and government and corporate
laboratories. When these scientists loosen up and
let their hair down, some of them, at least, know
how to have fun.

Not that their week-long gathering was a beach
party. Far from it. Most of the sessions at this
year's meeting -- a celebration of the last 100
years of accomplishments in physics -- dealt with
the usually weighty problems of the physical
world: experimental and theoretical particle
physics, condensed-matter physics, and atomic and
nuclear physics.

But as the usual bespectacled speakers droned on
in seminars on quark-gluon interactions and
Bose-Einstein condensation, many of their
colleagues sneaked away to standing-room-only
sessions on junk science and pseudoscience, the
physics of dance, the physics of baseball, and the
physics of beer.

Some even abandoned any attempts at maintaining a
pretense of professional decorum. With arms waving
in the air, Nobel Prize-winners and former
Presidential science advisers kept time to a
physics-cabaret show featuring a shapely physics
lecturer from San Francisco State University, who
sang popular hits, like Madonna's "Material Girl,"
with lyrics only they could appreciate:

     Some boys kiss me, some boys hug me
     I think they're passe
     if they can't talk about quantum theory
     I just walk away.
     I like geeks, and I like nerds
     at least they see the light.
     Science is my first true love
     'Cause it excites my mind.
     We are living in a high-tech world
     and I am a high-tech girl
     You know that we are living in a
     high-tech world
     and I am a high-tech girl.

Many scientists, even a few of the society's top
officers, acknowledged that they were pleased with
the lighthearted approach to the meeting, which
has gained a reputation among even its own members
of being a bit stuffy at times.

"It's the greatest physics happening since the big
bang," said Brian B. Schwartz, a professor of
physics at the City University of New York who was
the motivation behind many of the special
centennial events.

"People are really excited because there are so
many of us here," said Judy R. Franz, who has been
serving as the society's executive officer for the
past five years while on leave from her position
as a physics professor at the University of
Alabama at Huntsville. "There's a sense of
community, which has gotten lost to some extent
because physics has gotten more specialized and
meetings are more fragmented."

To make this year's centennial a memorable event,
organizers of the meeting decided to combine the
society's March and April meetings, which focus on
different subdisciplines and typically draw only
about 5,000 and 2,000 scientists, respectively.
"We thought at first that we'd get 7,000 for sure,
maybe 8,000 if we did a really good job," said Ms.
Franz. "Then, when 9,000 abstracts came in for the
talks, we decided it was going to be considerably
higher, maybe 9,000. But it's going to be 11,000
-- much beyond what we planned."

That was plainly evident from the thousands of
scientists who literally jammed the hallways
between sessions, clutching their phone-book-sized
programs, making it difficult for anyone to get
anywhere. At times, the convention center looked
more like a major sporting venue than a scientific
meeting. But this was, in many respects, the Super
Bowl of physics.

"A lot of people who were wondering, 'Should I go
to this big meeting?' decided, 'Well, how could I
not be there?'" said Ms. Franz. "When they found
out that all of the most important people in
physics were going to be here, they wanted to be
here, too."

Forty-five Nobel Prize-winners in physics and
chemistry turned out for a single luncheon with
high-school students and their teachers -- the
largest gathering of Nobel laureates outside of
Stockholm and the largest gathering of physics
prize-winners anywhere. Nine former White House
science advisers, all of them physicists, who
represented the last 30 years of Presidential
Administrations, were brought together for an
unprecedented session on advising Presidents on
science.

The society's birthday bash, wall-to-wall with
physicists in a room a half-mile long, attracted
6,000 to 7,000 people. Sixty universities and
national laboratories held their alumni receptions
together in a single room. And in perhaps the
meeting's most memorable event, the physical
society's gala brought postdocs dressed in
sweaters together with dozens of Nobel laureates
in tuxedos, a magician, the cabaret singer, and
actors dressed as Albert Einstein, J. Robert
Oppenheimer, and Madame Curie.

"That's probably the first physics black-tie event
that's taken place in 30 or 40 years," said Ms.
Franz. "I was the one who said the black tie has
got to be optional, because, knowing the community
as I do, there are a lot of people who wouldn't
come otherwise."

Indeed, only about 10 per cent of the men showed
up wearing tuxes. The rest, befitting the image of
the scruffy physicist, arrived in various types
and stages of attire. "The women looked okay,"
said Mr. Schwartz of CUNY, who planned the event.
"But the men, well, they were a real selection."

Judging by the long lines of people waiting for a
seat, the biggest hit of the night was the "Cosmic
Cabaret," featuring Lynda Williams of San
Francisco State. Calling herself the "Physics
Chanteuse," the former go-go dancer turned physics
teacher has been playing packed houses at science
conferences in between her teaching duties for the
past two years. She writes her own science lyrics
to fit such wide-ranging and somewhat stodgy
gatherings as the annual Midwest Solid State
Conference, the Conference on Compound
Semiconductors, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center
for Astrophysics Conference on Cool Stars, Stellar
Systems, and the Sun.

"I had the idea as a grad student to perform at
science conferences," she said between
performances. "First, they always have a banquet.
I also do a lot of shows for the general public,
and I thought, wouldn't it be great not to have to
explain anything?"

"This is the granddaddy meeting of all time. I've
been trying to get a gig with the A.P.S. for a
long time, but I've never been able to do that
because, until now, it's never been appropriate.
So I'm really honored to be a part of it. I was
told, though, to behave myself."

     I like physics and mathematics
     I think they are great
     I can calculate cross sections and decay
     rates
     I like playing with computers
     I love crunching code.
     I'm gonna simulate my theory
     with some Monte Carlo.
     Boys may come and boys may go
     and that's all right you see,
     I'm too busy making tenure
     to have a family.

Ms. Williams's shows did raise a few eyebrows
among the society's officers, who worried that a
former go-go dancer in a tight-fitting evening
gown, singing physics ballads, would send the
wrong message about women in science and offend
women who had struggled to make strides within the
male-dominated discipline.

"There was a lot of nervousness about this whole
operation," conceded Mr. Schwartz. "But we were
trying to be a little more playful, a little more
fun in physics. I wanted this to be the type of
party where, if you weren't there, the next day
someone would say to you, 'You missed a good
show.' Although they were nervous, they let me do
it."

The playful approach did provide some
public-relations points for the physicists, who
not only appeared more human, but managed to
connect with the public in popular talks on such
topics as "The Physics of Star Trek."

Those sessions, which were held in the convention
center and repeated several times during the week
at auditoriums in the local community, were part
of the first-ever physics festival, also assembled
by Mr. Schwartz.

His idea was to have physicists who were good
entertainers, rather than scientific luminaries,
present aspects of physics that people could
relate to. "They may be hearing a big name, but
you're really torturing them," he said. "We wanted
to make it accessible to everybody."

"The science community has to reach out," agreed
Kenneth Laws, a physics professor at Dickinson
College, who demonstrated the physics of dance
with the help of a ballerina. "A lot of science is
invisible, it's abstract, it's mathematical, and
it doesn't bear much relationship with our own
lives."

The meeting did feature many more-technical talks
by scientific superstars, such as Steven Weinberg
of the University of Texas at Austin, who spoke of
efforts to reconcile theories about the physics of
the very small with experiments. It also gave
participants a chance to see Stephen Hawking, the
cosmologist with Lou Gehrig's disease from
Britain's University of Cambridge, who typed from
his wheelchair his view of the "universe in a
nutshell."

But, surprisingly, the popular sessions attracted
equally large turnouts of physicists, as well as
students and laypeople. Fearing that their
discipline had become too abstract and esoteric
for the public to understand their work and
contributions, the officers of the physical
society said they planned to continue their
efforts to bring physics directly to the public in
the future.

"We're no longer just in the library or in the
laboratory," said Jerome I. Friedman, the
society's president and a Nobel Prize-winning
physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology. "We have gone out into society. We
want to inform the public about science.

"People don't understand what physics has
contributed to their society. If you ask people
where MRI technology has come from, they wouldn't
have the vaguest idea. People don't understand
that basic research gets transferred to
applications that change our lives. And if they
don't understand that, they can basically cut off
the source of new innovation for the future."

Does that mean the society's future meetings will
continue to rate high on the fun-factor scale?
Well, maybe not.

"Physicists always have fun," said Ms. Franz, the
society's executive officer, apparently irritated
by the question. "They just have fun talking about
physics with one another."

However they may view themselves, physicists
aren't likely to lose their image of
respectability any time soon. Based on her
experience at various scientific banquets, Ms.
Williams of San Francisco State rates geologists
as the true party animals, followed by
astronomers, then physicists.

"Physicists are the toughest audience," she said.
"They tend to be very conservative. But you know,
physics is a serious business. Astronomers are a
lot easier."

Coincidentally, the American Astronomical Society
is also celebrating its centennial this year and
the Physics Chanteuse has been hired as the
entertainment for its main banquet in Chicago in
June.

"Astronomers," Ms. Williams laughs, holding two
thumbs up. "Yeah. I can't wait."

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