A couple weeks ago, we showed you the Pre-History of Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk, highlighting a medley of the fancy foot moves of Cab Calloway, Sammy Davis Jr., Fred Astaire and some lesser-known figures like Rubberneck Holmes and Earl “Snakehips” Tucker. Someone could just as easily make another montage, a Post-History of Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk, and it would surely have to include the clip above. It features our favorite astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson strutting his stuff atStarTalk Live last year. In the background, you can see another great moonwalker, Buzz Aldrin, on the stage.
Episode #9 of Tyson’s Cosmos reboot airs on Fox tonight. US viewers can watch episodes 1–8 on Hulu here. The original Cosmos with Carl Sagan appears here.
Last week’s episode of the Cosmos reboot saw Neil deGrasse Tyson giving Fox viewers a lesson in evolution, a lesson that ended with the quiet but emphatic declaration: “The theory of evolution, like the theory of gravity, is a scientific fact. Evolution really happened.” This week Tyson, the astrophysicist who directs the Hayden Planetarium, introduced viewers to some subjects he holds near and dear: comets and gravity, the work of Edmond Halley and Isaac Newton, and how they changed our understanding of the world.
On Monday, the science world joyously celebrated a seminal astrophysics discovery. Using a telescope in the South Pole, researchers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics detected ripples in the fabric of space-time, called gravitational waves. These waves confirmed the inflation theory, which stated that for a brief moment — one trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the big bang — the universe was violently expanding faster than the speed of light. Stanford’s Andrei Linde (along with MIT’s Alan Guth) was one of the thinkers responsible for working out this theory in the 1980s. In the video above, another Stanford professor, Chao-Lin Kuo, visits Linde to break the news of the discovery to him on his front porch. Finding out that much of his career had been vindicated in such spectacular fashion, Linde was appropriately moved and stunned. You can learn more about Linde’s work in The Stanford Report.
In high school, my physics teacher taught the class by having us listen to his long, monotonous lectures. After I realized that I couldn’t digest his verbal lessons, I stopped listening. Instead, I picked up a textbook and never looked back. I can only imagine how much better off I would have been had I taken a physics class like Brian Greene’s special relativity course on World Science U.
We featured Greene’s work two years ago, when the Columbia University physicist and mathematician launched his impressive PBS series, The Fabric of The Cosmos. Now, Greene and other scientists have created a new education platform called World Science U, and it promises to offer rich, rigorous and engaging courses in the sciences — for free. As Greene explains above, the free courses offered by World Science U take abstract concepts and represent them graphically, using a slew of interactive activities and real-world scenarios. Students receive immediate performance feedback on the problem sets they complete, and have access to a large number of video lectures. Theory is illustrated by way of intuitive animations, and exercises are paired with video solutions that take students through the ideal way to derive the answer.
Although later classes will tackle general relativity, quantum mechanics, and other subjects, World Science U has only two full courses available at present. The first is Greene’s brief conceptual class on special relativity that lasts 2–3 weeks, called Space, Time, and Einstein. There’s also a more advanced, university level course on the same topic called Special Relativity, which lasts about 10 weeks. Interested? We’ll let Greene himself tell you a little more about them in the video below.
PhD Comics has released the third video in an animated series explaining Quantum concepts and devices. This one focuses on Quantum Entanglement and features the work of Caltech physicists Jeff Kimble and Chen-Lung Hung. Meanwhile Jorge Cham, creator of PhD Comics, provides the accompanying animation.
The Yale Puppeteers, consisting of Forman Brown, Harry Burnett, and Roddy Brandon, came together in the 1920s and spent almost the next seven decades touring the United States, putting on satirical performances that featured puppets in starring roles. They also staged performances at the Turnabout Theater from 1941 to 1956, turning it into a Hollywood institution.
In 1965, while speaking to the Los Angeles Times, Harry Burnett reflected on his career and recalled how the puppet troupe “entertained Charles Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Lionel Barrymore,” and even “presented a special show for Dr. Albert Einstein when he visited the street while teaching at Caltech.” That’s likely the origin of the early 1930s photo above, which features Einstein posing with an Einstein marionette. The website Retronaut provides a little more background on the photo:
Einstein saw the puppet perform at the Teatro Torito [a predecessor to the Turnabout Theater] and was quite amused. He reached into his jacket’s breast pocket, pulled out a letter and crumpled it up. Speaking in German, he said, ‘The puppet wasn’t fat enough!’ He laughed and stuffed the crumpled letter up under the smock to give the puppet a fatter belly. This is a wonderful photograph that Harry treasured. Harry Burnett also kept the letter in a frame and loved to retell the story and at the end give his pixish laugh.
Here’s a funny little variation on “rickrolling,” a term some of our readers might not be familiar with. So let’s quickly refer you to Wikipedia:
Rickrolling is an Internet meme involving the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song “Never Gonna Give You Up”. The meme is a bait and switch; a person provides a hyperlink which is seemingly relevant to the topic at hand, but actually leads to Astley’s video. The link can be masked or obfuscated in some manner so that the user cannot determine the true destination of the link without clicking. People led to the music video are said to have been rickrolled. Rickrolling has extended beyond web links to playing the video or song disruptively in other situations, including public places, such as a live appearance of Astley himself in the 2008 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York. The meme helped to revive Astley’s career.
Now, in another sign that rickrolling has gone beyond the web, we have above a snapshot of a quantum physics written by Sairam Gudiseva, a student at (we believe) White Station High School in Tennessee. As the snapshot shows, Gudiseva managed to run the lyrics of “Never Gonna Give You Up” down the left margin of the page … while still keeping his ideas flowing. Well done, young man. You can see a full page of his essay here.
The 1994 documentary above, Einstein’s Brain, is a curious artifact about an even stranger relic, the brain of the great physicist, extracted from his body hours after he died in 1955. The brain was dissected, then embarked on a convoluted misadventure, in several pieces, across the North American continent. Before Einstein’s Brain tells this story, it introduces us to our guide, Japanese scholar Kenji Sugimoto, who immediately emerges as an eccentric figure, wobbling in and out of view, mumbling awed phrases in Japanese. We encounter him in a darkened cathedral, staring up at a backlit stained-glass clerestory, praying, perhaps, though if he’s praying to anyone, it’s probably Albert Einstein. His first words in heavily accented English express a deep reverence for Einstein alone. “I love Albert Einstein,” he says, with religious conviction, gazing at a stained-glass window portrait of the scientist.
Sugimoto’s devotion perfectly illustrates what a Physics World article described as the cultural elevation of Einstein to the status of a “secular saint.” Sugimoto’s zeal, and the rather implausible events that follow this opening, have prompted many people to question the authenticity of his film and to accuse him of perpetrating a hoax. Some of those critics may mistake Sugimoto’s social awkwardness and wide-eyed enthusiasm for credulousness and unprofessionalism, but it is worth noting that he is experienced and credentialed as a professor in mathematics and science history at the Kinki University in Japan and, according to a title card, he “spent thirty years documenting Einstein’s life and person.”
For a full evaluation, see a poorly proofread but very well-sourced article at “bad science blog” Depleted Cranium that tells the complete story of Einstein’s brain, and supports Sugimoto’s tale by reference to several accounts. Of the documentary, we’re told that “based on all available data, the basic premise and the events shown in the documentary are indeed true.” In the film, Sugimoto travels across the U.S. in search of Dr. Thomas Harvey, the man who originally removed Einstein’s brain at Princeton. (See one of the original pathology photos, with added labels, of the brain above). Depleted Cranium continues to set the scene as follows:
Eventually, Sugimoto tracks down Thomas Harvey at his home in Kansas. When he requests to see the brain, Harvey brings out two glass jars containing the pieces. At this point, Sugimoto makes a shocking request: he asks Harvey if he could have a small piece of the brain to keep as a personal memento. Harvey says “I don’t see any reason why not” and proceeds to retrieve a carving knife and a cutting board from his kitchen. He cuts a small section from a sample he identifies as being part of Einstein’s brain stem and cerebellum and gives it to Sugimoto in a small container. In the final scene, Sugimoto celebrates by taking his piece of the brain to a local kereoke [sic] bar and singing a favorite Japanese song.
The notion that the bulk of Einstein’s brain would have ended up in a closet in Kansas seems strange enough. And as for Harvey: the pathologist shopped the brain around for decades—if not for profit, then for notoriety—even driving across the country with journalist Michael Paterniti in 1997 to deliver a large portion of the brain to Dr. Sandra Witelson of McMaster University in Ontario. Paterniti documented the road trip in his book Driving Mr. Albert, which appears to corroborate much of Sugimoto’s narrative, though the trip may itself have been a publicity stunt.
In addition to the brain, Einstein’s eyes were also removed, without authorization, by his ophthalmologist, who kept them in a safety deposit box (where they presumably remain). The entire story of Einstein’s remains is gruesomely outlandish, though one might consider it a modern celebrity example of the centuries-old practice of body snatching. If some or all of this intrigues you, you’ll appreciate Sugimoto’s documentary. Unfortunately, the video upload is rough. It was recorded from Swedish television, has Swedish subtitles, and is generally pretty low-res. However, as a title card at the opening tells us, “due to the extremely limited availability of this documentary, this will have to suffice until a copy of higher quality rises to the surface.”
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