Singing Science’s Praises

She slinks on stage in skintight silver lame pants, belting out ballads about the Big Bang, the vacuum, gallium arsenide, bosons, fermions and other subjects normally found in physics texts. She tosses her long auburn locks, cracking jokes about curved space and subatomic particles.

“There’s going to be a quiz at the end of the show,” she says. “Anyone who fails has to walk the Planck scale [the minimum-size scale in quantum physics].”

Every scientist dreams of seducing people with the beauty and wonder of the natural world. But few take it as far as Lynda Williams--the Physics Chanteuse--who puts her microphone where her mouth is.

With a shtick that combines aspects of “Cabaret,” “Mr. Wizard” and “I Love Lucy,” Williams serenades scientists, both celebrating and poking fun at their research. And by all accounts, they love it.

The American Institute of Physics, no less, commissioned her to write a song for Valentine’s Day. (She called it “The Love Boson,” inventing a new kind of subatomic particle). She’s played before such stodgy gatherings as the Midwest Solid State Conference, the Particle Accelerator Conference and the Cambridge Workshop of Cool Stars, Stellar Systems and the Sun.

Whatever the audience, she sings their tune, putting months of research into getting the science right. A former go-go dancer who teaches physics at San Francisco State University, Williams is on a serious mission. Too many people, she feels, get turned off science permanently when they’re young--largely because of the way science is presented in school.

“It’s like entry into an exclusive club,” she said. “You’ve got to pass the differential equation test, or you can’t enter the inner sanctum.”

Yet scientific know-how is too important to simply allow kids (or adults) to tune it out.

“We’ve got to be more seductive up front,” she said. Science is “a power tool of the mind,” and knowing it is not optional for anyone who doesn’t want to get lost in this high-tech world.

“If you want to make sure you’re not getting the wool pulled over your eyes, you’d better know science,” she said. “It’s a requirement for becoming a player in the game of life.”

Williams knows this firsthand. She was, as she puts it, “puked out of the pipeline” at a tender age.

As a youngster, Williams loved philosophizing with her friends about the meaning of life. However, she was terrible at math in high school. She failed algebra and geometry, and never went beyond.

While majoring in political science at Cal State Sacramento, she rekindled her interest in philosophy--in the big questions of what makes the universe tick.

“I realized that in order to make any decisions about the meaning of the universe, I had to know math and science,” she said. “And I was seriously deficient. I’d pick up Scientific American and I’d cry when I couldn’t understand it.”

The summer between her sophomore and junior years, Williams taught herself trigonometry and pre-calculus. Then she changed her major to math and physics. “I dove right into calculus and physics,” she said. “I was a maniac.”

The double major turned out to be too much, so she graduated in 1987 with a minor in physics and a major in math.

All the while, Williams loved to sing and dance. At 16, she was using a fake I.D. to compete in dance contests at disco clubs. She even taught disco dancing at Arthur Murray.

“It was just like ‘Saturday Night Fever,’ ” she said.

After graduating from college, she fell in with “a bunch of wild artists” in Sacramento, became a go-go dancer, and soon started producing her own shows.

The first was about a mad scientist who used wormholes through space-time to transport dancers from the past into the present. She produced interactive videos with science themes, toured Europe doing street theater (a 20-minute musical piece on the Big Bang), and eventually worked at the San Francisco Art Institute as manager of the New Genre department.

By 1993, “I was craving to learn more physics,” she said. She quit her job and got a master’s at San Francisco State, and did a brief stint at UCLA as a doctoral student.

“I feel guilty because they gave me such a great opportunity, and I never completed any of my courses,” she said. “But I’m 35. I was looking at seven years [of doctoral work].”

Like Superman’s Clark Kent, Williams has a quieter side. Teaching her conceptual physics class at San Francisco State recently, she could almost be mistaken for a normal physics teacher--lecturing in front of a blackboard covered with equations, handing out quizzes and nagging students to turn in their homework. As one girl turned in her quiz, Williams frowned at an answer.

“Is hertz a unit of energy?” she asked the student, who mistakenly used the measure of frequency. “What’s the unit of energy?”

But even in this fluorescent-lit institutional setting, Williams’ flair for drama shines through.

“I want to talk about electrocution,” she said, with a gleam in her eye, explaining how a large enough current can freeze muscles in place--making it impossible for someone hanging onto a wire to let go.

“That’s bad,” she said with a laugh.

Then she related the infamous battle between Edison and Westinghouse over alternating versus direct current, and how Edison “fried small animals” and invented the electric chair to scare the public away from the so-called horrors of his rival’s scheme. (Westinghouse’s AC won anyway.)

Back in her small office--her black leather motorcycle jacket (she rides a Harley clone) tossed over the chair--she explained that the stories make a political point: Science can be used for bad ends. Some of her songs make the same point, taking on nuclear waste disposal, slash-and-burn agriculture and nuclear bombs.

But more than politics, using electrocution to bring sparks to an otherwise dry discussion about electricity is part of the seduction.

“Who wants to hear about a bunch of dead facts?” she said.

In performance, Williams pulls out all the stops.

Singing on a boat before an audience of particle accelerator physicists in Berkeley recently, she starts out with her usual string of “in” jokes, welcoming “all you wigglers and undulators out there.” (Those are technical terms in the field.)

She jokes about forces and fields, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the energy of the empty space. She quotes the ancient philosopher Democrites and current Fermilab cosmologist Michael Turner.

“That’s cool stuff,” she says. “Why do you need ‘The X-Files’?”

She talks about symmetry in physics, then says: “That makes me want to break out into song.” To recorded music she composed and arranged on a synthesizer, she sings about super-symmetry theories--often called “theories of everything.” She dances and clowns, playing “mad scientist” in dorky glasses and white lab coat.

Her Chanteuse is more Lucille Ball than Madonna. “I’m not polished. I’m not beautiful. If I tried to be sexy, I’d fall flat on my face.”

She was upset when an organization of women scientists declined her offer to appear, apparently thinking her act sent the wrong message about women’s roles. She guessed they felt women in science ought to be doing forefront science, not singing about it on stage.

But Williams is primarily an entertainer. “I sing and dance, and I’m interested in science, so I sing and dance about science.”

There’s a message in all this for girls in particular: Fun and science do mix. You don’t need to be a nerd to love math and physics.

One of her signature pieces is “High-Tech Girl,” sung to the tune of Madonna’s “Material Girl.”

It begins: “Some boys kiss me, some boys hug me, I think they’re passe; if they can’t talk about quantum theory, I just walk away.”

Girls who don’t get into science, she said, are giving away their power. Besides, they’re losing out on all the fun.

“There are a lot of girls and women out there missing a great adventure,” she said. “Science is more fun than boys.”