“Bringing science to the cultural center” was how Tracy Day, co-founder of the World Science Festival put it. And given the contributions by Broadway musical stars (Jonathan Hadary and Danny Burstein), two outstanding classical musicians (Yo-Yo Ma and Joshua Bell), celebrity actors (Alan Alda and Glenn Close), a full orchestra on stage playing music specially composed by Philip Glass, a Baptist choir, and a children’s ballet group all appearing at the Alice Tully Hall at the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts, her claim was amply justified for the packed audience at least. This was a true razzamatazz science-festival launch that only New York could have delivered with such style!
Oh, and there were some scientists too.
The occasion presented an unashamedly upbeat celebration of science’s exploration of the mysterious and awesome – cosmolgy, high-energy physics and the natural world all received due attention through physicist and WSF co-founder Brian Greene’s commentary, musical interjections, and large-screen multimedia presentation.
All of these scientific frontiers have been explored and celebrated time and time again in the media, so how to make it feel fresh?
Getting top-rank artists to genuflect to science was one way. The highlight was surely a masterly arrangement by Todd Ellison of the periodic table of the elements to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Major-General song. Hadary’s performance from memory surely deserves to be on YouTube, and I am inclined to insist that such a performance become an entrance test for any candidate for Nature’s editorial staff. A setting of Aristotle’s elements earth, air, fire and water was much, much shorter but equally strongly applauded.
Another sense of freshness arose from the coincidence of the event with E O Wilson’s 80th birthday. Accordingly the event was geared to celebrating him and his science, and its messages about evolution and implications for the need to protect our planetary habitat, with a tribute from Jim Watson and a ballet with ants gyrating to a Bach cello suite.
Anyone, like me, from a less wholeheartedly ebullient culture, used to cooler-headed discussions about science and its impacts, about complex interplays between scientific values and those of society at large, and about the differences between science and the arts, might have found the whole event both naïve and disconcerting. But the audience evidently lapped up every minute of it, and so did I.
Posted on behalf of Philip Campbell.
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