One of the joys of living in LA is being surrounded by talented and creative people of all stripes, both inside and outside the world of science. Recently, for example, my friend Gia Mora helped me redesign my main website. This is a long-overdue upgrade; the site has existed in one form or another since 1996, and has been hacked together in html by me. Remarkably, things have changed over the last twenty years, and what sufficed in the waning years of the twentieth century had become unwieldy and unable to cope with the challenges of modern webbery. Now I have a working site that should be ready, for example, for the publication of The Big Picture.
But all of that is just an excuse for mentioning that web design is not Gia’s primary calling — it’s acting and singing, often with a bit of scientific flair. For anyone in the LA area, I encourage you to check out her show Einstein’s Girl, appearing at the Malibu Playhouse on Saturday Feb. 27. I’ve seen the show, and it’s great, plus I’m told there will be highly topical gravitational-wave jokes added in for just this occasion.
Gia’s singing about physics recently took center stage at Caltech, for the Institute of Quantum Information and Matter’s One Entangled Evening event. Besides the famous Rudd/Hawking quantum chess video, and maybe a few science talks, the highlight of the program was John Preskill, resplendent in black tie, joining Gia to sining a duet about quantum entanglement. John is not technically a professional singer like Gia is, but he did write the lyrics, and I can testify that he’s very good at quantum mechanics. Hats off to both the performers.
There seems to be an issue with your about/cv page. I get a warning from my browser that the site is not save and going anyway, the webpage also states that there is a problem
I believe that’s a glitch from the IP address changing in the course of the upgrade. Should be able to just hit reload until it works.
The song “One entangled evening” is entertaining, but it must be said that John Preskill’s singing is extremely terrible. I used to believe that Garrison Keillor had the worst voice of anyone who would voluntarily sing in public, with Florence Foster Jenkins as the only exception; I stand corrected.
bob,
Preskill’s not a pro, just a (rather fearless) enthusiast. You may be a good judge of musical talent but I think the standard you’ve applied reflects a touch of metaphorical tone deafness – and judging by their reaction, the audience seems to agree.
arch1, your analysis is spot on. John stayed on tune; his weakness lies only in lack of training,. Yet there he was, putting his all into the performance. For a non-singer, he did remarkably well. The point here was not the skill of the performers, it was the delightful play on words and the shared nerdness of the lyrics. I enjoyed it very much. Take that, you non-nerds who think nerds take things too seriously. Well, some do. Bob, for example. 😉 (And I am not at all surprised that the first comment related to a glitch in the website– some things just are.)
Didn’t Einstein marry his cousin?
I think that quantum entanglement could be measured by the ripples of spacetime,through the reflections infinities in the mirror symmetry.the gravitational waves would formed by the gravitons,where the black holes merged would generate the strongest gravitational fields stretching the space and twisting the time,both spacetime are spooky sources of the quantum entanglement.the metrics of spacetime are altered how much the torsion of spacetime increase till the infinity.the singularity could not exist because the universe is beyond the fourth dimension.the fourth dimensions is the conjugations transcendent of infinities spacetime continuos.because there is the asymmetry of left handed and right handed in its transformations.it occur in the speed greater than the speed of light.then the transformations only occur upper of speed of light.occur in 4dimensions through the no commutative topological geometry,with the component time deforming the space in two opposed orientations enduring the space by the time splitted in two dimensions.then thence appear the spacetime continuos
“Didn’t Einstein marry his cousin?”
Yes. His second wife was actually a double cousin: Elsa’s mother was the sister of Albert’s mother, and Elsa’s father was the cousin of Albert’s father.
Einstein first considered marrying one of Elsa’s daughters.
Einstein had three children with his first wife, Mileva: Lieserl, a daughter who was unknown until a few years ago, and probably died as a child while living with relatives in Serbia (she was born before Albert and Mileva were married, hence the secrecy); Hans Albert (later a professor in California); and Edward, who had schizophrenia. Some claim that Evelyn Einstein, Hans Albert’s adopted daughter (he had 4 other children, two of whom died as infants and one as a child), was Albert’s illegitimate daughter. Einstein was something of a pop star of his time not only with regard to popularity and media attention, but also with regard to groupies, so, like Brian Jones, he might have had several illegitimate children.
Oh well, De gustibus non disputandum est and all that sort of thing, but I agree with bob. As a singer Preskill makes an excellent physicist. I certainly won’t be giving it a second listen.
The girls is very beauty,is belissima as say the Italians