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

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:

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.”

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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