11/8/2023 0 Comments Sang along“I was absolutely overwhelmed,” said Smith. ![]() ![]() Thanks to his six-year involvement in collecting physics songs, last year Smith inherited some valuable historical documents: a bundle of ancient mimeographs of some of the songs sung at the Cavendish Laboratory in the early 1900s, carefully preserved by Arthur Quinton. Before he achieved national fame for his satirical ditties, Tom Lehrer was a physics grad student at Harvard, where he penned an entire musical show called The Physical Revue. There’s even a US precedent for physics singalongs. Thomson standing on chairs and singing parodies at the top of their lungs. By the early 20 th century, Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory had made singalongs a tradition of their winter holiday parties, with participants like J.J. Maxwell composed alternate lyrics to the then-familiar folk song "Comin' Through the Rye," substituting the meeting of two young lovers with a rumination on the physics of collisions. James Clerk Maxwell may have been the first physics songwriter. Smith is a physics professor at Haverford College who runs what he describes as the premiere online collection of physics songs in the world. Singing songs about physics is a long, time-honored tradition that originated in England, according to singalong organizer Walter Smith. They were certainly present in spirit at the first ever APS Singalong, held in conjunction with the March Meeting in Baltimore, where over 50 attendees sang physics-centric lyrics to familiar tunes while being accompanied by a guitar and a bongo. Richard Feynman would have been there in a heartbeat. ![]() Laura Greene and Walter Smith wow the crowd with a duet performance of "Fabricate!"
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