So this evening the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science threw a reception. It's part of a year's worth of events in celebration of Einstein's big papers that he published 100 years ago in 1905 and for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize. So several weeks ago Norman contacted me and said that the APS and AAAS want to hire about 20 actors to role-play important 20th-century physicists at the reception and would I like to play Erwin Schrödinger?

Schrödinger, a native Austrian, is known popularly for a thought experiment involving a cat; he shared a Nobel with P. A. M. Dirac for his work during the 1920s on a function that described atomic matter as quantized waves. He also had a reputation as a ladies' man: a story has it that he was denied an appointment to an American university because he asked to bring his wife and his mistress along.

Well, Sunday arrived and I was feeling insecure about my preparation and a little sniffly and run down from my New York trip. I called Norman in the morning and tried to weasel out of the gig, but he convinced me he needed me to come in. So I popped some decongestants and came to the reception, or should we call it "Renaissance Faire for Physicists"?

I needn't have kvetched about my preparation. There were a few people that wanted to go into details about the wave equation, and others who were disappointed that my German wasn't fluent (I explained that the teleportation device that had brought me to visit them from 1926 had not preserved all my faculties). My dialect was a disaster. But most everyone was willing to play along. A group of Japanese were particularly mad to take my picture and I signed one autograph. And I had to come up with an answer for "So who are you really?"

There were actually two receptions, the first one for VIPs, press, and diplomatic staff, and I made sure to hit the open bar during that one. I talked to a couple of people from the Austrian embassy, who pointed out that Schrödinger's face was no longer on the currency since Austria's conversion to the euro, and so I got some mileage out of that in subsquent chit-chats.

But mostly I did the ladies' man schtick. I tell you, it's the easiest $250 I ever made, for three hours of having my picture taken and flirting.

Now people who know me will tell you that flirting is still work for me, but still.

With my hair combed back and Erwin's round glasses (he suffered from cataracts), more than one person said that I looked like Liam Neeson. What's up with that?

posted: 11:31:22 PM  

Brendan I. Koerner writes about the Cool Dog ice cream and cake concoction sold at ballparks. He assigns it to the culinary category of ice cream novelty, of which the archetype is the Drumstick sundae in a cone. Aren't we dealing with a label that has become its own contradiction over time, like Paris's Pont Neuf or Mexico's 70-year PRI? Can something that's been around since my mother was born be called a novelty?

posted: 9:52:40 AM  

Jim Holt challenges proponents of Intelligent Design:

posted: 9:41:49 AM