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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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