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Eric Siegel wrote:


> 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.
...
-- 
              Wayne T. Watson (Watson Adventures, Prop., Nevada City, CA)
                  (121.015 Deg. W, 39.262 Deg. N) GMT-8 hr std. time)
                   Obz Site:  39° 15' 7" N, 121° 2' 32" W, 2700 feet

                 "The easiest way to refold a road map is differently."
                         --Jones's Rule of the Road

                         Web Page: <home.earthlink.net/~mtnviews>

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