[Welcome to “Favorite Things,” a new feature here at “Secret Life.” Today we get started with Stephon Alexander’s top five albums ever recorded. Do you agree with our resident physicist/saxophonist? Tell us about your top five in the comments.]

My philosophy of a great album: A great album is like a lost love. It’s missed if you lose it.  A great album becomes a fabric of yourself. 

5 “Madonna” by Madonna: “Borderline” is da bomb-still listen to it. I hope that no one makes a remake of it. I wonder if Mr. Kaplan taught Jellybean Benitez (one of Madonna’s producers who went to my high school).

4 “Speak No Evil” by Wayne Shorter: Genius! Genius!

We’ve had several requests for more of Stephon’s sax improvisations, so here you go… from the “Secret Life” studios.

Here’s our own Stephon Alexander, theoretical physicist and jazz saxophonist performing live. “I was a professor of Physics at Penn State (three years ago),” says Stephon. “I played every Friday at a jazz club called Bar Blue. The band played jazz standards, funk and afro-jazz. The name of the band was called STAQ (the Stephon Alexander quartet).” With some help from Mr. Kaplan and John Coltrane, Stephon is a very cool jazzman.

Watching the videos of Stephon Alexander had me thinking about music in so many different ways. My students may be too young to fully understand what a Theoretical Physicist does, but they aren’t too young to see the connection between science and music. The Exploratorium has an interactive section devoted to the science of music. This site is terrific for all grade levels. You can experiment with different sounds and instruments and read about the science behind the sounds themselves. The video below is from PalmBreezeCAFE where I demonstrate a few key features of this fascinating site. After having your students watch the videos of Stephon Alexander, why not take them on a “field trip” to the Exploratorium?

Some colleagues and I (including an anthropologist, chemist, sociologist, economist, and a computer information theorist) recently decided to start having weekly get-togethers in my living room to talk about our craziest ideas. We even gave the event a name, the George Coleman Lecture Series. We love you, George, BUT STOP PRACTICING!! The point was to do exactly the opposite of what traditionally happens with academic talks—that is, spending countless hours and thought preparing for the talk. Rumor has it that the great trumpeter, Miles Davis, fired his tenor sax player, George Coleman, because he was caught practicing before the gig. It was in that spirit that speakers at our meetings were encouraged to be improvisational and to not spend more than 15 minutes planning their talks. The idea was for it to be a conversation amongst friends—you simply talk about what you’re thinking about. The catch, of course, is that you do open yourself up to showing your ignorance to your colleagues.

My colleague and mentor, social theorist Mark Gould, had an interesting theory that sparked the Coleman Lectures (and pretty much all great theories are simple and elegant in hindsight). Mark’s idea was that academics should have space to play with their ideas with each other. This is EXACTLY what jazz musicians do, especially in group improvisation. Even if there is a well-defined structure (i.e. chord changes), each different instrumentalist holds a musical space while the soloist plays. There is no such thing as a wrong note. It is in this momentary state of play when we truly expose ourselves to the band and the audience that sparks of novelty arise. And it works. I used to record some of my gigs, and I was always surprised to hear how bland I sounded when I was playing the “right notes.” The sections when I had thought I was messing up turned out to be the very best parts of the recordings.

Here’s theoretical physicist, Stephon Alexander, when he was 3 years old in Princess Town, Trinidad. So what was on his mind back then besides String Theory?

“I played a lot with toy cars and trucks as well as my grandmother’s animals, such as goats, cows, and dogs,” says Stephon. “I also enjoyed going to the beach with my grandfather, Stephon ‘Sonny’ Belfon.” The night sky, the jumbies, the moon…. Stephon is already thinking!

I thought of so many ways to run with Stephon’s story, I had a hard time choosing! I finally decided to go with his anecdote about the moon chase, how his childhood in Trinidad stirred his desire to find out how things work.

Stephon tells about the night skies on the southern coast of the island of Trinidad where he grew up. Because there was no light pollution, the moon and stars shone bright in the sky and had, I imagine, a peculiar presence. Stephon and the other kids believed in a kind of ghost they called Jumbies, and it crossed Stephon’s young mind that the moon was something like a Jumbie chasing him. It never caught up with him, though! Easter Island… another great place to see the moon And he wondered why. Stephon took his curiosity about such mysteries and became a physicist. I suspect he found the real reasons behind the phenomena of nature more fascinating than the myths.

Still, we can’t dismiss the allure of the mythical, the fantastic, even when we grow up. It holds some attraction for most of us. We like supernatural and science fiction/fantasy literature. We dress up on Halloween, and we enjoy the preternatural sensations that creep up on us when we hear the scuttle of dead leaves across the sidewalk. Centuries after we’ve learned better, we like to think the dead can walk. Maybe we’ve yet to evolve out of a need for the liminal, the fantastic.

Stephon studies the connections between things that are enormous—like universes—and things that are teeny—like neutrinos. I already know of one shared feature: their size is incredibly difficult for me to wrap my mind around.

The observable universe is apparently 92 billion light years across. But how big is that, really? In my head, that means about the same as if it were 92 million, or 92,000, or 9.2 light years across.

A neutrino—which is a particle, like an electron, except with neutral charge—has mass, but the number is debated: it’s somewhere between 0.05 to 0.58 electron volts. Huh? What’s an electron volt?

It all looks teeny here… but it’s enormous. I’m not the only one who struggles with conceptualizing the very big and the very small. Luckily, my neighborhood science museum—the American Museum of Natural History, in Manhattan—has a fabulous exhibit to help us out. It’s called the “Scales of the Universe.”

The exhibit spirals around an 87-foot planetarium, called the Hayden Sphere, which becomes a reference point for all of the objects around it. For instance, you might stand in front of a 10-inch globe with the big dome behind it. The exhibit text tells you that if the dome were the sun, then the globe would be the earth. If the dome were a raindrop, the globe would be a red blood cell. If the dome were a red blood cell, the globe would be a rhinovirus. And if the dome were a rhinovirus, then the globe would be a hydrogen atom.

Pretty cool way to think about size, right? Plus, if you walk up the spiral path that leads to the planetarium, you’ll see a timeline of the earth’s history, beginning with the Big Bang and ending with present day. On this scale, the era of human existence spans the width of a human hair.

So next time you’re in the Big Apple, make sure to stop by. It’ll blow your mind.

Photo by ajstarks on Flickr

The Henry Brooks Adams quote that “a teacher affects eternity” is certainly true in Stephon Alexander’s case. I really enjoyed his films and they reinforced my view that teachers can have a huge and profound effect on people’s lives.

H.B. Adams was right. We have all gone through some sort of educational system and along the way most of us have met bad teachers and average teachers and hopefully some good and great teachers. That is so important; especially for subjects such as the sciences. These are subjects in which sometimes dry and (dare I say it) boring topics need to be communicated to students. It can often be a struggle just to teach the information. But to excite and enthuse students about these subjects is the sign of a great teacher.

Throwing a ball up in the air (as one of Stephon’s teachers does in “A Real-Life Superhero”) is a deceptively simple act, but it may be all that is required to get the ball rolling on many scientific careers.

[Eoin’s own blog has been nominated for an Eircom Spider award. To vote for him, please click here. He’ll appreciate your support.]

So I wondered…. Where does science come from?

Does it come from Bill Nye the Science Guy? After all, “science” is right there in his name.

Young Stephon… Or does it come from Google? When I do a Google search for “science,” I get over a billion results. That has to be the mother lode of all scientific thought, right?

Good guesses, my friends, but no cigar.

These answers can’t be right, because, as remarkable as it may seem, science existed even before Bill Nye the Science Guy and Google were twinkles in their parents’ eyes.

Adrift in a harsh, unyielding universe and searching for answers, I looked for help from our new scientist, Stephon Alexander. And he told me where he had found science:

“The roots of me becoming a theoretical physicist started back in the island of Trinidad. I grew up in a village close to Venezuela. So it was on the southern coast of the island, and there was very little light pollution. And as a kid, we believed in things like ghosts, and we called them ‘jumbies’ in Trinidad. So if you’re a kid out at night, and no one has ever told you that the Moon is a moon—a piece of rock in outer space—you might think that it could be a jumbie trying to follow you. That was my big question. Why is this thing, whenever I run away from it, it just continues to follow me? Or why doesn’t it ever come and try to get me? So that kind of question, a natural inquisitiveness, I had, wondering about things, especially the night sky. You know, looking at little insects and trying to distinguish, ‘Okay, what makes this alive when a piece of twig isn’t alive?’ So I used to wonder about these things. And that natural environment of Trinidad, without the light pollution and noise pollution, really provided a good setting for that.”

I finally had my answer.

Science, it turns out, comes from Trinidad.

Ask him your questions. And he will give you his answers. Tenor sax players, identify yourselves as such, and Stephon will move you to the front of the line!

UPDATE: We are no longer taking more questions for Stephon. But check out his answers in the comments. He may have answered a question you were going to ask!