Physics A-Go-Go
S.F. State teacher sings the praises of science in her nighttime gig
Steve Rubenstein, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, November 26, 1998
©1998 San Francisco Chronicle
Physicists are not supposed to dress up in slinky black outfits and jump up and down in black boots and sing torchy songs inside dark planetariums.
That's the trouble with most physicists. They're boring. Lynda Williams is not that kind of physicist.
``Gravitrons attract both mass and energy!'' she crooned the other night at her sold-out show inside the San Francisco State planetarium. ``They make the world go round and round, that's what you do to me!''
The stars twinkled on the ceiling, but they were clearly outshone by the young woman with the master's degree who at that moment was vibrating like a pulsar, erupting like a solar prominence and bouncing from orbit to orbit like an electron leaping between quantum levels.
The cosmic soup expanded and cooled! The particle zoo was born in the goo!
By day, Williams teaches freshman physics at the campus on 19th Avenue. By night, she undergoes a transformation as profound as anything brought on in a lab by a Bunsen burner, and she emerges as the Physics Chanteuse. She writes and sings her own songs, about particles, elements, quantum mechanics and the Big Bang, in which the word ``bang'' is not intoned in the way most physics teachers intone it.
In her skintight getup, she does not look like a physics teacher that most people get for physics, either.
The other night, the show was a sellout. It was a sellout partly because it was a terrific show and partly because the college planetarium seats only a couple of dozen folks. At $10 a head, said the prof, show biz pays even worse than teaching.
Life on Earth is carbon based/It came here on rocks from outer space/It formed organic compounds/Till the carbon cycle went round and round/Carbon is a girl's best friend.
After the show, she sells tapes of herself in the lobby, then invites the audience to the observatory on the roof to look at Saturn through the college telescope. It's a double feature unlike any other, although poor Saturn has one tough act to follow.
Williams, 36, is a former horse trainer from Auburn who decided that physics was not all that hard after all, and got herself a master's degree in it.
``The public is afraid of this stuff,'' she said. ``They think it's really difficult. But it isn't, not really.''
Twice a week, she faces an even tougher audience -- a lecture hall full of undergraduates. Up front, she is one high-energy particle, flitting among the blackboards, then sitting cross-legged atop a table in her motorcycle boots or dancing up and down the aisle to return exam papers.
``You can't touch something without being touched back,'' she tells her students, paraphrasing Newton's third law in a way that probably never occurred to Newton.
``It's an interactive universe!''
Which brings up a question from the last exam:
``A speeding dump truck and a flying bug collide head on, splattering the bug all over the windshield. Is the force the bug exerts against the windshield greater than, the same as, or less than the force the truck exerts on the bug?''
The answer is, it's the same.
And is momentum conserved when a cherry bomb explodes inside a clay pot, spewing parts of the pot all over? Yes, says Williams, you bet it is.
These are the kind of questions, her students say, that are at least as good as whatever the answers are.
``She's a great teacher,'' said a kid in the back row. ``You don't go to sleep in here.''
Williams is perhaps the only physics professor in these parts who hands out 8-by-10 glossies of herself, and certainly the only one whose curriculum vitae includes a stint as lead dancer on the ``Go-Go Show'' on cable TV.
She commutes from her North Beach flat to campus on a motorcycle, because a particle in motion tends to remain in motion. Between classes and concerts, she climbs mountains, to increase her potential energy.
If the singing catches on, however, she plans to drop the classroom gig and go Hollywood full time.
``I'm an entertainer first,'' she said. ``And science is inherently entertaining.''