Geek rap a "vital form of science communication"?

The magazine Symmetry takes as its portfolio "particle physics and its connections to other aspects of life and science, from interdisciplinary collaborations to policy to culture." The November 2008 issue contained a commentary from Alpinekat—Kate McAlpine, the physics-educated science communicator. She offered thoughts about using rap in her trade.

"Maybe it's just a flash in the pan," she wrote, "or maybe this will become another way to get the word out about scientific ideas and research." And: "We need to keep putting information out at a level that people without specialized training can understand, appreciate, and maybe even dance to."

Science rap is no flash in the pan according to Dennis Overbye, the high-visibility New York Times science writer. This week he proclaimed that "'geek rap' ... is becoming one of the most popular and vital forms of science communication." Immediately he added: "Few exegeses of the Large Hadron Collider match Alpinekat’s 'Large Hadron Rap' for punch and rhythm, and Stephen Hawking’s robot voice and puckish wit have spawned a host of imitators, like M C Hawking, rapping about black holes and entropy."

Overbye's comments appeared in "Paying Homage to Darwin in an Unconventional Format: Rap" in the Times's Science Times section. The article reviews The Rap Guide to Evolution—a show that, Overbye reports, recently opened for a summer-long run at the SoHo Playhouse in Manhattan.

Steve Corneliussen

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.