Physics: The Musical!

Physics 16 teaching fellow Alexia E. Schulz leaps off the large wooden table into the arms of fellow TF David J. Morin and the two began a Charleston-like dance across the room as their students dance in their seats. Schulz executes a handstand as Morin grabs her legs. She wraps her feet around his neck and clasps his knees with her hands as he begans to spin quickly around to the swing music playing. When Jessica L. Ross ’03, the actress playing Schulz (who, like Morin, is a character based on a real Physics 16 TF of the same name), falls on her head, the music stops and the rest of the cast, after realizing that she is not seriously injured, bursts out laughing.

It’s just past 3:30 p.m. in the Winthrop JCR and about a dozen members of the cast of Les Phys, a physics musical that will go up in the Agassiz Theater in May, are busy rehearsing.

Les Phys is the child of a marriage between the physics and music departments. Peter J. Dong ’02, a joint concentrator in Quincy House, wrote the show as his senior thesis and is the production’s music director. As a first-year, Dong knew he wanted to concentrate in both physics and music, but learned to his horror that this would require a thesis combining the two subjects. The only idea he could come up with, besides writing a paper on the physics of sound, was a musical about physics students. Though he soon learned that physics doesn’t actually require a thesis, thus leaving him with only music to worry about, Dong couldn’t get the idea of Les Phys out of his mind.

The story takes place in Harvard’s own Physics 16, an advanced mechanics course for first-years, and centers on a battle of wits, or at least a battle of problem sets, between the hero, Steve, and D.B. (short for Deathrage L. Bergman), the archetypal pain-in-the-ass section participant. Late in the semester, Steve finally builds up the courage to call D.B. an idiot, and the two agree to compete in a problem set competition. Of course, no musical would be complete without a love story, and Dong delivers one between Steve and his Physics 16 classmate Christene Heisenberg (the fictional great-granddaughter of Werner Heisenberg, of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle fame).

Sitting at the baby grand piano in the Winthrop JCR, Dong directs the chorus of physics students surrounding him, making sure they not only hit the right notes but also pronounce equations accurately as they sing. As Heller shows the actors their dance moves for the section scene, she proposes an arm movement to represent the lyric about vectors and wonders aloud about what precisely a vector is. (“Vectors have magnitude and direction,” giggles one of the more physics-savvy chorus members.)

Les Phys is steeped in Dong’s own experiences at Harvard, from pursuing the connections between music and physics to wrestling with procrastination. The script is also filled with real-life Harvard characters like Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics Howard Georgi, who in the play gives lengthy and complex physics explanations in a song that ends with the lyric, “But I’m sure you won’t have any problem with that.”

Dong describes the music in his 258-page script as a combination of “traditional 16th-century choral singing, energetic Broadway dance numbers, cheesy pop ballads, 19th-century waltzes, and pretty much everything in between.” Les Phys also pokes fun at the Broadway genre, with a running Les Misérables gag and references to everything from The Sound of Music to “Gangsta’s Paradise” in the song lyrics. Heller reflects this playfulness in dance sequences that parody famous Broadway scenes. “There’s a definite West Side Story moment,” she says of a scene where a conversation between Steve and Christene about vectors transforms into a Tony-and-Maria dance homage.

Despite songs like “Positive-Definite Non-Degenerate Symmetric Bilinear Forms,” Dong insists that Les Phys is not just for physics afficionados. For him, physics and music go hand in hand, as his protagonist sings in “The Sound of Physics”:

Every problem’s a song,

It makes it worth my tears—music to my ears—

Sorrow disappears when I see:

Physics has music; each equation has a tone.

Come listen with me to

symphonies untold,

’Cause physics has a music

all its own.