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When You Wish Upon an Atom: The Songs of Science
By MICHAEL ERARD
It's been years since Timothy Sellers, then a budding naturalist,
licked a slug. Now he writes pop songs about scientists who were less
absurd about their empiricism. Thirteen of them appear on "26
Scientists: Volume 1, Anning to Malthus," a CD that Mr. Sellers and his
Los-Angeles-based band, Artichoke, recently released.
That's Mary Anning, the 18th-century Briton who assembled fossils to
support her family and who first discovered the ichthyosaur. As in
Artichoke's other songs, the one about Malthus mixes biographical
detail ("Thomas Robert Malthus/the second son of eight kids/grew up
with a stutter") with intellectual history ("with the revolution/came a
lot of high hopes/Malthus took a good look/uh-oh uh-oh) and the
primordial rock chords of G, D and C ("la la la la la/la la la la la/la
la la la la").
In the small but slowly accreting world of science-themed music, songs
tend to focus on processes and objects, as in Tom Lehrer's "Elements."
Mr. Sellers, a 37-year-old artist and set painter, wants to change that
balance, focusing on scientists "because people like to listen to songs
about people," he says.
Though he's not a scientist, Mr. Sellers pursued a major in physics
before switching to art at Williams College (where he and this reporter
became acquainted). It seems natural to him that someone would want to
dig up Mary Anning's past, Darwin's wandering attention span and
Einstein's sleeping habits, or take on the challenge of putting
"geocentric," "Copernican" and "phlogiston" into pop songs. The bigger
challenge, Mr. Sellers says, was to "try to write every song so that
people would dig it."
He ends up with songs that draw scientists not as heroes or as mad
geniuses, but as ordinary people who befriended a new idea or two and
paid the costs of their passions. Most of the scientists he sings about
have been treated well by history: Einstein, Kelvin, Galileo,
Heisenberg, Darwin, Marie Curie and Joseph Lister. Others, like the
Dutch chemist Jan Ingenhousz, who investigated light, air and plants,
are more obscure.
Rock music, even of the indie persuasion, tends to avoid science. The
Pixies have a song about Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, builder of the
Eiffel Tower, and the celebrated geekiness of They Might Be Giants
produced "Particle Man" ("Particle man, particle man/doing the things a
particle can") and "The Sun Is a Mass of Incandescent Gas," among other
science-y songs. And the folk-pop duo Kate and Anna McGarrigle made
chemistry a metaphor for romance in "NaCl" ("Just a little atom of
chlorine, valence minus one/Swimming through the sea, digging the
scene, just having fun"). Scientific themes probably show up more often
in music videos, as in Thomas Dolby's 1980's hit, "Blinded by Science."
In the late 1950's and early 1960's, Tom Lehrer, a
mathematician-turned-entertainer , contributed classic science songs
like "The Elements" ("antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium"), "Wernher
von Braun" and "There's a Delta for Every Epsilon."
Around the same time, William Stirrat, an electronics engineer,
co-produced six albums of science songs for children ("Why Does the Sun
Shine?" and "Vibration"). Mr. Stirrat, whose songwriting nom de plume
was Hy Zaret, was better known as the person who wrote the lyrics to
"Unchained Melody."
Now, most science songs are written for middle school science students,
says Lynda Jones, a former teacher and a co-founder of the Science
Songwriters' Association in 1999. The association now has 40 members, a
mix of professional musicians and science teachers. Dr. Greg Crowther,
an acting lecturer of biology at the University of Washington and an
association member, has archived 1,800 songs about science on his Web
site.
The association also helps amateurs record their music, encourages
songwriters to fill out the song paradigm (marine biology lacks songs)
and keeps the science up to date.
Scientific accuracy is a big challenge, Ms. Jones says, interrupting a
telephone interview to sing a problematic lyric she adamantly opposes:
"Just one element is what an atom's made of."
"No, no, no, that's wrong," she says. "No scientist talks that way."
She often brushes up the science in her own songs. At the recent
meeting of the American Chemical Society, she was reminded that
electrons do not actually orbit the nucleus of the atom, but vibrate in
a cloud around it. "And I thought, well, I have to change my song," she
says.
In his quest to enshrine scientists in rock 'n' roll, Mr. Sellers
forced himself to choose just one for each letter of the alphabet. "D"
was crowded, but Darwin ("grandson of a poet, also of a potter, was
brought up by his sister") beat out da Vinci and Doppler.
The list still provokes conversations about whom to include, but mixing
the well-known with the obscure was deliberate. "If I picked all
totally obscure scientists, people wouldn't go 'ah-hah' quite so fast
or at all," Mr. Sellers says. "I also like scientists people know
something about because they come with a context."
Finding women was also a challenge. Volume 1 includes Marie Curie and
Mary Anning; Volume 2 will have a song about the physicist Chien-Shiung
Wu, whose quip makes up the chorus: "There's only one thing worse than
coming home/from the lab to a sink that's full of dirty dishes foam/and
that's not going out to the lab at all."
Mr. Sellers also minds the accuracy of his songs. In some cases, he
explains, the song's structure "selects for" a certain line. In the
song about Dr. Wu, who died in 1997, he needed to add another syllable
to her conclusion that "parity was not conserved." (In physics,
"parity" hypothesizes that two symmetrical systems will develop
symmetrically. Dr. Wu and her colleagues showed this wasn't the case.)
The line, which now reads "parity was not quite conserved," scans
better - though it softens Dr. Wu's claim.
If Mr. Sellers is self-congratulatory about anything, it's the band's
ability to rock. On a recent Sunday evening, Artichoke rehearsed in the
living room of Mr. Sellers's Los Angeles home, thick sheets of foam
hung over the windows to keep the Pixies-like guitar hooks and bass
riffs away from the neighbors.
This brand of garage psychedelia still finds room for an accordion as
well as the de rigueur theremin, played by the band's only real
scientist, Steve Collins, an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
in Pasadena, Calif.
Their sound has won some notice, including a 2002 review in The Los
Angeles Times that praised the "inspired songwriting" and "infectious
indie pop."
Mr. Sellers grew up in upstate New York, the oldest son of
back-to-the-land parents who took to the woods and built an A-frame
house with no electricity or indoor plumbing. Mr. Sellers calls it his
"Robinson Crusoe childhood." He and his younger brother created their
own natural history society, where all the members were required to
present their discoveries.
Mr. Sellers's slug-licking episode occurred when he was 10 and was
helping his mother tend their garden tomatoes. As he removed slugs from
the plants, he recalled asking, "Why don't the birds eat them?" Because
they don't taste good, she replied. Disbelieving, he picked up a slug
and licked it, an act he quickly regretted: the slug indeed tasted bad,
and its slime burned his tongue. But he used his data. He wrote about
the experience to get into Williams, singing the praises of first-hand
exploration.
Eric Siegel
Executive VP
Programs and Planning
New York Hall of Science
47-01 111th Street
Queens, NY 11368
esiegel at nyscience dot org
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