Subject: [vallist] How I met Einstein in Hollywood, part I (#8)
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2000 23:31:38 -0800
From: Michele Vallisneri
To: Vallist
Dear Friends,
weeks and months get by, and I find that I am posting to this list much
less than I would like to. I started this year and century with great
enthusiasm and many new ideas, but my animation was quelled by a gloomy
February, well-deserving of its Revolutionary name, Pluviose, and
blighted by other annoyances of various kinds. There was no point,
really, in sharing my seasonal melancholy with you.
However, we are now well into March! California is once again pleasantly
balmy, and there have been several positive developments in my life.
First, my research has picked up again, after a sluggish time ``between
projects''. Second, I am now the proud owner of a slightly rusty (but
sturdy!) Toyota station-wagon: a prosaic betterment to be sure, but a
very wanted one in this land of wonders and possibilities, all a few
miles apart from one another.
Finally, I am fresh out of the quintessential southern-Californian
experience: a brief stint in the Hollywood movie industry! I thought you
might be interested in a recounting of this story (since it came out
rather long, I split it in two parts).
I look forward to meeting you again, in person or in print!
Love,
Michele
--> My Hollywood gig, or how I met Albert Einstein [Part I]
These days, e-mail is a big part of my life: through the day I am
cheered by the tinkling ``ping'' that is my computer's equivalent of
``you've got mail''. I especially cherish the moment in the morning when
I log onto the internet and read the messages that arrived during the
night, most of them from Europe. As I do this, I usually have the
newspaper in one hand (the comics pages being the first thing I read),
and my bowl of raisin cereals in the other. A couple of weeks ago, while
in this posture, I heard the familiar tinkle announcing a message from
the Physics Department Executive Officer, Ken Libbrecht, to all physics
graduate students:
<< Physics Grad Students: I'm looking for someone interested in a quick
Hollywood physics gig. Pepsi is shooting a commercial, which includes
Einstein standing in front of some equations on a blackboard. They want
an ``expert'' to make sure the equations are okay. You will need to be
available all day on the 14th and 15th of March to watch over the shoot,
at Universal Studios. >>
Wow, this sounded really exciting! I would get to play the role of the
grand expert, to show off impressive-looking physics formulas to
laypeople (be their interest genuinely curious, or merely mercenary: I
would not ask!) I could even pretend that the financial gain I would
find in the commercial exploitation of the Einstein mythology was
justified by the need to ensure scientific accuracy.
With luck, my conceptions and my handwriting would be featured in the
finished commercial, and thus would be seen by a greater multitude than
a life's worth of papers and books could not dream of reaching. This
thought was inebriating, even if, as a would-be scientist, I have
supposedly chosen the quest for authoritativeness over that for fame.
Finally, I thought it would be exceedingly interesting to observe the
inner workings of the Hollywood movie industry, arguably the strongest
and most prominent force in the society and in the culture (well,
sometimes) of southern California.
After waiting for a couple of minutes to conceal my eagerness, I wrote
back to Libbrecht, offering myself for the job and flaunting my
affiliation with the Caltech relativity group. Who better than a true
relativist could, ehm, check Einstein's equations? Sure enough, I got
the job, although the part about concealing my eagerness cannot have
worked too well, because Libbrecht could not resist taking a cheap shot
at me in front of all the physics grads:
<< Physics Grad Students: Just to let you all know, I gave the Pepsi job
to Michele Vallisneri. No particular reason, just that he's in Kip's
group, and he responded almost immediately. I figure people who sit in
front of their computers answering their e-mail quickly ought to get off
campus more! >>
Thanks to Ken, I spent the following week graciously receiving the
congratulations (or the ironies) of fellow students, while progressively
honing my cunning response. It always happens to me that when I get the
same question over and over, my answer starts to feel like a well-
rehearsed part, and I cannot resist rating myself on each performance.
(``Hmm, you could have used a smidgen of self-deprecation over there'',
or ``good delivery, well-paced, modest...'') I fall into a serious case
of doing this when I go back to Italy and everybody starts asking me why
there are no bakeries in California.
* * * *
The commercial would be filmed for Pepsi by a top production company,
Pytka, already behind the recent Pepsi campaign built around the
ringlet-haired young girl, Hallie Eisenberg (those of you living in the
States have probably been already overexposed to her cute, little smile)
. Some high-powered advertisement ``creatives'', up in New York, had
dreamed up the script for the ``Einstein'' spot:
A wild-haired, elderly Einstein ambles through an austere wood-paneled
corridor (possibly Princeton, 1950), stopping in front of a couple of
glowing soda dispensers. ``Hmm! Interesting,'' he mumbles in a heavy
German accent, ``Coca Cola, or Pepsi Cola? It's a paradox!'' The camera
closes in on Einstein's eye, travels along his optic nerve, and into his
brain. So we are treated to a tour of Einstein's subconscious: his first
memories as a child, playing with blocks and composing them into
formulas, his hair already wild; his toys, floating around him, many of
them harbingers of discoveries to come; a young Einstein, teaching in
front of a blackboard full of formulas, in a severe German classroom,
circa 1909. Then we see more sundry, visually cool special effects,
including psychedelic fractal fields and lissom nymphs flittering
through a silver forest. Finally we are back to, uhm, reality, where a
shadowy figure wades through heavy dry-ice mists to hand us the moral:
it is the little girl, who chirps ``dah? It doesn't take a genius to
figure out which cola tastes better! Take the Pepsi challenge and let
your mouth decide.'' Einstein could not agree more. ``Pepsi Cola! It's a
no-brainer!'', he concludes, sipping mirthfully from his blue can.
This breathtakingly intellectual work of art would benefit of my
services as ``scientific consultant'', working under Pytka's art
director, Janet. I would provide formulas for baby Einstein's blocks;
brainstorm with Janet about the toys that a budding scientist would have
liked to play with, and the scientific contraptions that a _laureate_
physicist would have loved to have around; finally, I would chalk
blackboard upon blackboard with impressive-looking, historically
accurate formulas.
Janet and her assistant, Steve, came to see me on the day after I
received the momentous e-mail. My group's secretary, Shirley, even let
me use the office of my absent boss to receive the notable strangers.
Trying to look as professional as I could, I ran through the catalogs of
scientific classroom supplies they had brought me, pointing out the
objects that would look appropriate around Einstein, and that could
possibly double as the toys of a baby. The dark-maned Janet struck me as
adrenalinic and capable, if somewhat glib; Steve seemed to be a yes-man
under the aegis of a powerful woman, but I would later revise this
opinion to see him as a bright, truly good-natured man. You could tell
these people were from their company's art department, for they carried
colored markers in their pockets, and colored marks on their hands.
A week later, I faxed Janet a few samples of the formulas that baby
Einstein would compose with his toy blocks. [Skip to the asterisks below
if you hate reading even one word about physics!] I chose Laplace's
equation of Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism; in some sense,
Maxwell's equations contained the germ of Einstein's theory of special
relativity. I further jotted down the special-relativistic mass-energy-
momentum relation,
2 2 4 2 2 E = m c + p c .
[It will only look good if your mail client has a fixed-width font!]
This equation is the correct, more general version of the ever popular
``E equals m c squared'': you must know that any time that a physicist
stumbles into this cliche turned into graffiti or candybars, she
silently shouts, ``in a rest frame!'' Finally, I proposed Einstein's
equation of general relativity (``G mu nu...''); of course I included
the ``cosmological term'', which was introduced by Einstein to force
general-relativistic cosmology to produce stable, static universes, as
seemed philosophically indispensable. But then the Universe was _seen_
to be expanding, and Einstein disowned the cosmological term as his
``biggest blunder''. In a curious historical turn, this term was very
recently reinstated into equations by new measurements of the rate of
expansion of the Universe; but it has a sign opposite to Einstein's, and
its effect is to make the expansion of the Universe accelerate!
* * * *
On the following day (a Saturday), I drive west to Universal Studios,
located in the center of the modestly named Universal City. I am cleared
at the gate (even the guards have a dramatic air), and proceed towards
stage 43, which Pytka has rented to film the Einstein commercial, ``No
Brainer''. The ``stages'' are huge, empty warehouses with giant steel
doors. Inside, there are no fixed devices or constructions, except on
the ceiling, which has catwalks and struts to suspend lights and
weights. At the moment, there are few people around. Carpenters are
erecting Einstein's classroom, unhurriedly nailing basswood planks into
place. Just to the side is the austere corridor through which Einstein
shall stroll to the vending machines. Craftsmen are varnishing the
corridor's wooden panels. The enclosure has no ceiling (the illumination
will come from above).
Clustered against one warehouse wall, I find several small rooms; one of
them is labeled ``art department'', and that is where I find Janet and
Steve, amid a huge heap of toys. There are construction blocks of all
shapes and colors, cubes, pyramids and arches; there are tops (I
suggested a gyroscope) and prisms and tinker toys; antique toy trains
and cars; a violin with a metronome and sheet music; an old, adorable
rocking horse, its blonde tail missing. The director has chosen two out
of the three formulas that I proposed, and we endeavor to compose them,
using all these toys. I settle for some lovely, old engraved blocks,
which have almost all the letters and numbers I need; an upside-down
``V'' will serve as a Lambda, and a ``9'' can perhaps be modified to a
``g''. Eventually Janet will have these blocks remade in a larger size,
painted with a proper, turn-of-the-century German font, and aged
artificially.
We also try to assemble the formulas out of bare geometrical shapes, but
the results are not outstanding. I am given some black putty to secure
the wooden blocks, but in the end my hands are awfully smeared, and they
stick together, while the blocks do not. Later I face a disheveled
blackboard, and fill it with an Einsteinian physics derivation, taken
from a book and slightly adapted for turn-of-the-century notation. I
throw in a couple of graphs for good measure. However, this is only a
sample: the large blackboards in Einstein's classroom have still to be
built, and I will engrave them early in the morning on Tuesday, the
first day of shooting.
(...to be continued...)
--------------------------------
("The Vallist" #8; Pasadena, March 23, 2000)