Introduction: A Capella Science

Some years ago, a student emailed me a YouTube link. “Hey Mr. Lord, Have you seen this yet? It looks like the type of thing that you would like.” The video was a parody performance of Ed Sheeren’s song, “Shape of You,” except the title of the parody was “The Molecular Shape of You.” and instead of telling Ed Sheeren’s story of a first date at an all-you-can-eat-buffet, the parody told how atoms combine into molecules which combine into crazy complicated molecules which combine into your body. The lyrics were witty. The animations were spot on. And the music was the painstaking mixing of one person’s voice singing every musical element a capella.  The person was Tim Blais, and man … did he know what he was doing! My foot started tapping, and my head started bobbing, and I immediately wanted Laura to come listen, … but she was in the shower. 

By the time she got out I had discovered that Tim Blais had a whole channel of this stuff called A Capella science and had watched two more videos and was about to start a fourth. This one was a parody of the song, “More Than Words” by Extreme, except this one was about the evolutionary descendants of the dinosaurs called “More than Birds.” 

By this point, I didn’t just want to show Laura some clever diversion I’d found on the internet. This was not some cat and cucumber video or someone’s ranked list of the ten worst 90s movies. This wasn’t content; this was art. I dragged Laura from the bathroom explaining the layers of artistry here. The music was so lovingly and earnestly sung. The videography was so meticulous. The lyrics were surgical, doing so little damage to the parent material while telling a completely different story, a story that was lighthearted but contained more than humor. And the science! Ah. This guy knew it so well. This wasn’t just parody. This … This … This was transcendent. This was discovery and wonder and awe. 

“Awe?” Laura asked with a raised eyebrow. She adjusted her towel. “Can I get dressed now?” 

Nerd Culture

I’ve wanted to write about different trappings of nerdiness since I started this podcast. I Heart The Far Side or xkcd comics. Maybe I should write about my wardrobe which basically consists of science related T-shirts. Maybe I should write about Veritasium, SciShow, Physics girl, Minute physics, Eons, Microcosmos or just do an episode on all of them called I Heart Science YouTube. But none of them ever felt quite big enough, and I was never quite sure exactly what I wanted to say. Sometimes you don’t know why you like something even when you are 100% certain that you do. So in this month’s I Heart This, I finally decided to put it all together in one omnibus episode. This is I Heart Nerdiness … an exploration about what’s truly wonderful about things like a T-shirt that says, “my password is the last eight digits of pi.” You’re listening to “I Heart This.” 

The Phenomenon: Nerd Aesthetic Defined by Example

Quick note: People expend a great deal of energy in reddit forums to parse out exactly what a nerd is and how one might differ from, say, a geek. And I get it–pedantic is kind of a nerd specialty. But I have to say, I’m not really interested in that question. So … I’m just going to say that for the sake of this episode a nerd is a person with enthusiasm for off-beat and eccentric things. My sandbox, my rules. You are welcome to proclaim how wrong I am about this on the subreddit of your choice. 

Growing up a Lonely Nerd

Loneliness

I knew I was a nerd from about the age of four because of the tub of plastic dinosaurs that I kept under my bed. God, I loved dinosaurs? I read my dozen or so dinosaur books to shreds, like they were almost completely held together with scotch tape. 

In first grade, my friend Ernesto and I sat at a cafeteria table by ourselves and had conversations that went something like:  

“Well, have you ever heard of coelophysis?”

“Yes, have you ever heard of baryonyx?” 

“Uh huh, have you ever heard of parasauraLOPHus?”

“Do you mean parasaurOLophus?” 

Doh! Ernesto always knew more than I did. 

Anyway! I didn’t know why dinosaurs were so cool. When I was six, they were just cool. They were big and some of them had sharp teeth. And they lived a crazy-long time ago. And all we had were bones for clues. And scientists were figuring out more about them all the time. 

Dinosaurs continue to be an enduring love. But they were only the first of many. I spent a lot of my childhood passionately consumed by things that no one else seemed to care about. I spend most of my spare time reading the types of books that other kids would only check out of the library if they’d been assigned a report. There was my Greek mythology phase. There was the phase where I kept nature observation notebooks and caught insects in butterfly nets. There were phases for birds and wildflowers. There was the phase where I was into ziggurats and Roman emperors. And rocks. Man, I loved collecting rocks. 

Being a nerd in suburban Connecticut in the 1980s was not like being a nerd today. In middle school, for example, you were only supposed to be into one of six things–sports, clothes, The New Kids on the Block, members of the opposite sex, fancy cars, or making fun of the New Kids on the Block. For some reason it was especially important if your clothes had the right words on them like Tommy Hilfiger or Gap or Limited. Stepping outside the bounds was a crime punishable by one’s peers. And being the guy who (I kid you not.) carried a mineral hammer and a pair of safety glasses on the school field trip just in case I spotted something interesting. Well … let’s just say I was definitely outside the bounds. 

Do y’all remember Bert from Sesame Street? That’s a rhetorical question, of course you do. He was a unibrowed, yellow, cone-headed Muppet. He was also the perpetual straight man to his fun-loving roommate, Ernie. He loved bottle caps and pigeons and collected paper clips. Bert was an over the top caricature because of the absurdity of what he loved. I mean, who could really be that into oatmeal. 

But here’s the thing. Bert didn’t choose what he loved. It just kind of happened. And when you love something that nobody else is into, everyone sees you as a bore. To me, Bert was a tragic character, alone in what he loved and because of what he loved.

 And I really felt for the guy. Because as far as the kids around me were concerned, I might as well have been into paper clips. 

The Miracle: Nerds Become Cool

Fast-forward to the present day and it’s obvious that something crazy has happened. Over the course of about thirty-odd years, nerds somehow became cool. 

Now I have no data to support this and I’m no social historian, and I have no way of saying for sure what caused this miracle. But let me tell you … it did happen. 

I went to college in 1995, just a few years after the internet was born when my obsession du jour was making stone-aged tools. And I remember surfing on Netscape (remember, Netscape) and stumbling on the web page of a guy who made primitive spear throwers in upstate New York. I actually leapt out of my chair in the basement computer lab. 

In college, I struck gold with my fascination with stone age technologies. Holy cow, cave-people were all over the internet. I was at the beginning of this incredible resurgence of primitive skills knowledge. A primitive renaissance. And yes, I am completely aware of the irony that it took the internet to make the stone age cool again. I am aware of it, and I embrace it fully. Hallelujah! 

And it wasn’t just me. All around the world, people were finding each other. By the time the twentieth century turned into the twenty-first, it didn’t matter what you were into. Even if there were only six or seven other people in the world who were devoted to your particular style of trainspotting, you could find them. Do you build your own telescopes? So does this other kid in Boise. Do you carve bears out of tree stumps with a chainsaw? Post a gallery of your work, and who knows, you might just find love. Imagine Bert’s joy when he stumbles across the web presence of James Ward, an author and paper-clip collector, who says that in that little twist of wire he finds a piece of art. (I’m not making this up. It took a 15 second search to find.)  

Nowadays, there are way more than six things that you’re allowed to be into. Instead, there is a pervasive new ethos of “You do you.” And you don’t need to be with the ‘in’ crowd to find a crowd of your own, however small, that understands the language of your heart. 

To see what I mean, consider the story of my eldest daughter, Eva whose middle school experiences was worlds away from mine. Eva went to our village’s tiny elementary school from preschool through eighth grade. So by the time she walked across the rented risers on her eighth grade move-up ceremony, she had been with the same twelve kids for her entire school career. 

My god, Eva loved those kids! She looked forward to seeing them every day. She joined the basketball team not because she liked the sport or because she had any particular talent for it. I doubt she even knew all the rules. But she wanted so desperately to have an excuse to hang out with her friends. 

When the spring of 8th grade arrived and the end of her elementary school years loomed, Eva began to grieve the imminent breakup of her friends. Word trickled in that some of her classmates were applying to different private schools in the area. Others would transfer to the high school north of us. And so, only about half of her friends would go with her to our local high school. And Eva knew that it wouldn’t be the same. 

It was around this time that Laura and I finally got Eva a cell phone, something that we had postponed as long as we could. But by that spring, all but one other kid in her class had one and Eva was starting to be noticeably left out of things, despite her and her friends best efforts to make it work over email. 

At first she was so excited to join the group chats. She would fill us in on the jokes that got passed back and forth and the drama that inevitably follows eighth graders around like a swarm of mosquitos. And I think Laura and I were relieved that getting Eva a cell phone hadn’t interfered with her continuing to grow as the kind, bright-minded, curious person that she was. 

But a month or two later, something changed. And before I tell you about it, you should know that Eva almost never expresses frustration. Laura and I would joke that she would see the bright side to  waiting in line at the DMV. 

But then one night, Eva knocked on our bedroom door in tears. And after she’d buried her face in one of our pillows and we’d pulled out the tissues, she told us about just how lonely she was feeling. She would send out invitations all the time, but seldom got them in return. She’d reach out to see if someone wanted to go with her to an event and no one would get back to her. She felt like she was always contributing, always building people up, always looking to celebrate someone else. And she was just wishing for some love in return.

Eva often posted long mini-essays to the group chat with her poetic observations of the world. They were full of inspiration and gratitude and wonder.  They were sweet. They were heartfelt. They were a little vulnerable. And usually no one responded. Then someone would go back to passing memes. I think that her friends just didn’t know what to do with her earnestness. 

That particular night, someone had responded to her latest post of musings about how one ought to live a good life.  

“Cool story, bro.” 

It might have been insensitive, but it wasn’t mean. But I think it was enough for Eva to realize that that was the best she was going to get… even from these friends that she so dearly loved. 

What is a parent to do when your kid feels pangs of loneliness and hurt that you are powerless to soothe? That night, we just held her and ate ice cream and listened. 

Eva never stopped being her good-humored, effervescent, gregarious self. She still took every opportunity to hang with her peeps. But after that night, she stopped dreading the end of middle school. And one day she told me, “Y’know. I think I’m ready for high school. I think I’m ready for something bigger.” 

And she was. After her second day at the high school, she came home with a part in the school’s fall play and a half-dozen new friends. “I love theater people,” she told me, practically vibrating with joy. When I asked her what she loved about then, she said, “I don’t know, I think in theater people are just willing to be awkward all the time and not worry about it.” She found friends who “were just so easy to talk to” who would take whatever philosophical musings she put out there and instead of saying “Cool story bro.” would say “Yes! And …” 

Eva still has a big place in her heart for her PCS friends. She still makes time and space for them in her life. But watching her with her new friends, it is clear to me that she has found her own tribe. She has found her people. Her nerds just happen to be theater nerds. 

We all have our awkwardnesses. We all have our overly earnest exuberance about something. And what a joy and relief and miracle it is when we find someone else who can take our expressions of that and say, “Yes! and …” It’s a little bit like falling in love.  

Look out there at the communities that have grown up around all kinds of unbridled enthusiasm. Look through the vastness of the world online, there are so many more people sharing their love for origami or terrariums or recreating authentic 19th century fashions. It turns out that we were all nerds looking for a place to belong.

This isn’t a kind of tribalism or cliquishness. Communities built on common enthusiasm don’t have hazing rituals or purity tests. They have exuberant welcomes. Finding your people isn’t about joining an exclusive club. It’s about finding an inclusive one. One that is expressly inclusive of you. 

Take a moment to think about the comrades in love in your own life. Maybe you grow irises. Maybe you raise heritage goats. Maybe you watch horse ballet. It has never been easier to find other people who are into what you’re into. We truly live in wonderful times.   

Aesthetic

I am part of lots of nerd communities: long-distance runners, foragers, people interested in evolutionary ecology, and amateur sundialing. I’ve even met another person who also makes artistically rendered 3-D topographic maps. Though hers are amazing and are nothing like the ones I’ve made out of empty cereal boxes. 

But I like to segue from nerdishness in general to one type of nerdishness in particular …the flagship of all nerd cultures … the OG … the one that everyone associated with the word nerd … I’m talking about the nerdishness of people who love math and science.

If you thought that other nerdly pursuits had found their own niche, science nerdom has reached disorienting level of cool.  Things like a capella science are blooming everywhere. Even in popular culture, nerds are no longer just the butt of the joke. Now they’re heroes. We’ve got Tony Stark and Hermione Granger. We’ve got basically the entire cast of Stranger Things. They even made a sitcom written entirely about nerds in the Big Bang Theory. 

It wasn’t that long ago when the only nerds you could find on TV or at the movies were ones like Steve Urkel or George McFly  … or like Bert. The characters we portray are reflections of the attitudes of their times. And in the times of my childhood, the attitude seemed to be that people who were really into math and science were completely out of touch. They were out of touch with culture and had no idea about music or fashion or what was cool. They were out of touch with their peers and had to sit by themselves at lunch and had no chance of going to a dance or on a date. They were even out of touch with their own bodies, either simpering weaklings or overweight loners. 

They were insufferably dull. And the subtext was that the science that they loved was too. I take that back, that wasn’t subtext. It was straight text. “I’m not a math person.” was a line in every single high school movie of the 1980s. Science and math were hard. You did them because you had to. If the director wanted to evoke a math classroom, they didn’t even bother to put real math on the blackboard. They just scrawled a bunch of unrelated symbols and meaningless equations. 

But it wasn’t all just pointing and sniggering. There was, and I think for some people there still is, this underlying conviction that science isn’t just boring; It is Camazotz. It saps the poetry and spirit out of everything it touches. It reduces living things into networks of interacting tissues, sunsets and starlit nights to mere wavelengths on the electromagnetic spectrum and the flight of a bird into vector quantities. It reduces life into tables and numbers. As a man once told Richard Feynmann, “As an artist, I can see how beautiful this flower is, but you as a scientist take it all apart and it becomes dull.” Science takes a living, breathing, emergent world and reduces it to a machine. 

On behalf of my fellow nerds, I would like to say that this is wrong. 

Science is not separate from art and aesthetic endeavors. It is an artistic and aesthetic endeavor. 

I was recently interviewed by a reporter for a local newspaper about a collaborative lesson that I was teaching with an art teacher about soap–both the art and the science. And the reporter asked me, “Why is it important for kids to have these kinds of cross-curricular experiences?” And I had to stop for a moment because it’s kind of a funny question. Teaching science and art together isn’t actually all that weird. It only seems weird to us because that’s how schools package knowledge to confer credits and degrees. But it’s not a natural separation. As my wife says, “Kids don’t see the difference. Science and art only stay separate if you work to keep them that way.” As John Green said in a classic vlogbrothers video, “The vast majority of us imagine ourselves as like literature people or math people. But the truth is that the massive processor known as the human brain is neither a literature organ nor a math organ. It is both and more.”

And another thing, science doesn’t limit our appreciation of the beauty of the world. Of course, scientists can see the beauty of a flower! But they can also marvel at the beauty of the vast and complicated worlds contained within it. The scientist sees that this flower is built of millions of little boxes that are each, in themselves alive. How fantastic! If you have never looked at a flower through a microscope, you are missing a whole dimension of it. It is a cellular wonderland, full of strange and wonderful things. But that is nothing compared to the astonishing improbability of photosynthesis which locally holds back entropy itself and somehow happened completely by accident in the primordial seas. Deeper still are the molecules which cannot be resolved with a microscope. But they are also beautiful, even if we can only ever see them in our imaginations. ATP synthase is a particularly dazzling one, probably my favorite of all time. I can still remember the happy dizziness I felt when I realized that this unthinking collection of atoms spun like a wheel in a waterfall! And not only that, it captured energy by spring-loading other molecules that would bathe every corner of the plant with stored sunlight. 

Don’t tell me that learning about the stars diminishes my appreciation of them. I know that stars bend spacetime itself. Or how about that you, your very atoms, didn’t exist when the universe began. It took a star to make them! … You are literally made of stars that blew up and sent the contents of their guts into space. What could be more wonderful than that?

In one of my favorite XKCD comics of all time, one stick figure is complaining to another, “The problem with scientists is that you take the wonder and beauty out of everything by trying to analyze it.” 

When, from off-panel, another voice calls out “Dude! My plasmodial slime molds have heightened pigment production! Check out that yellow color. It actually makes them zinc-resistant! Amazing, huh?” And she runs in with a microscope in one hand and a palmful of yellow goo in the other. 

The complainer holds her hands over her mouth, “Oh my god, it looks like dog barf.” 

“Hah! Yeah!” says the scientist, “F. septica is nicknamed dog vomit slime mold. Cool, huh! Check out my slides.” 

And the complainer turns back to her companion and says, “Okay never mind! The problem with scientists is that you do see wonder and beauty in everything. Oh god, it’s moving!” 

“It wants to hug you! So cute.” 

Science doesn’t diminish our appreciation of beauty. Beauty is why we do it! It is true that science often leads to practical applications. (For example, we can fly! We eradicated smallpox.) But most scientists don’t go into research because it is practical. Mostly, we’re just too excited to see what happens next. Often, the practical applications aren’t even obvious. Most of us aren’t thinking, “Hmm. I wonder how we can exploit our newfound ability to detect gravitational waves.” No! We’re thinking, “Dude! We just saw two black holes collide!” 

And I think that this is at the heart of nerdom, whether it’s based on a love of math and science or anything else. Nerdiness is an aesthetic. It is a predisposition to find a certain kind of thing beautiful. And for lots of us science nerds, what is beautiful is the universe itself … and the process of discovering it. What is beautiful is that the world is stranger than we think … at every turn. And because of that we seek out art and stories and humor that makes the everyday normal world seem strange and wonderful again. 

For example, I have a T-shirt that says -273.15 degrees. And then below that are the words, “Absolute zero is the coolest.” Oh my gosh … this shirt is beautiful for so many reasons. First, it is a secret handshake to all my physicist friends. I can’t tell you how many times strangers have stopped me to high-five about it or to say, “My brother would love that. Can I get a picture?” It’s an automatic signal to of fellowship to other enthusiasts that I will happily engage with them about topics they might otherwise avoid at a party for fear of putting someone else to sleep. My shirt, in essence, says, “No way! Let’s go there. What do you think about Bose-Einstein condensates.” It celebrates the weirdness of there being a minimum temperature at all. Why is the world that way? So far as I know, there can’t be a maximum temperature. How awesome that there is a minimum one. And … it is playful and funny. I’m no comedian. Most of the time when I deliver the punchline, everyone is still looking at me wondering whether I’d just told a joke or not. But this shirt communicates a whimsy and playfulness even if my funny bone is broken. 

Something wonderful happens when art takes an idea that is usually uttered in the professional, reserved, and serious language of scientists and touches it to a third rail of emotion. In this case, one of laughter. 

But I think the emotional tone that I find most affecting is one of wonder. It is a great joy to think about all we’ve learned and about how we learned it. But mostly we are in awe (Yes, awe!) of all that we do not know. [Transition]

There is a quote, attributed to Isaac Newton, the authenticity of which I cannot verify. But whether it was ever actually uttered by the great scientist, its imagery captures perfectly my scientific aesthetic. I will tell the story as it came to me, as legend. 

In the spring of 1762, Isaac Newton sat for dinner with a friend who would soon also become his biographer, William Stukeley. Newton was eighty-three years old, at the end of a long and eventful life. He had made what were arguably the most influential scientific discoveries of all time. They had earned him great prestige, international fame, universal respect, even a knighthood. When Stukeley pressed Newton to reflect on his lifetime of superhuman accomplishments, Newton responded, “I do not know what I might appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” 

I am grateful for the few fragments of shell I have found, for the pretty ones that others have shown to me, for my fellow beachcombers whose enthusiasm for the shore is so infectious, and most of all, for the ocean whose depths will always be a mystery.