The Last Word On Nothing

The first time I heard Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” there were a lot of things I was on the verge of understanding. My first contact with the song was in the movie Wayne’s World, which also highlighted some of this dawning awareness. I knew it was funny when the main characters, Wayne and Garth, said “Schwing!” but I didn’t know why. And there was a nebulous cloud of comprehension around why Wayne thought the rocker played by Tia Carrere was so foxy.

“Bohemian Rhapsody” underscored these vague mysteries. The song held a murder of some kind, and foreign-yet-familiar sounding words like Scaramouche and fandango. That Galileo guy, I’d heard of him before. (I later learned that lead guitarist Brian May had been studying astrophysics before joining Queen, and finished his doctorate in 2007.)

OK, so I didn’t understand the lyrics, but I was used to that. I’d been listening to bands like Faster Pussycat and Def Leppard and Aerosmith and Queensrÿche–which, along with lyrics I didn’t understand, had names that had this wonderful, inscrutable appeal. (What’s that umlaut for? Didn’t they know how to spell leopard? Why, despite all this, are they so cool?)

If you’ve gotten this far, and you kept an eye on quirky science news stories last week, you’ve probably realized where this is going. Last week, a McGill University graduate student released a wildly popular video of a version of “Bohemian Rhapsody” that incorporated much of his masters’ thesis. (In fact, it’s only got a handful of YouTube dislikes: from Newton using multiple accounts, according to one commenter).

Once again my mind was blown, just like it had been freshman year of high school. All these questions, answered: How do you pronounce Weyl symmetry and dilaton? What would Einstein look like as a sock puppet? Why do people wear ties around their heads when they’re rocking out? (This last one I’m still not sure about.)

I’m only sort of kidding. One of the bummers about getting older is that I have been starting to push up against limits of my own understanding. My brain used to seem like an infinitely expanding universe, and I was certain that, with time, I’d be able to learn anything I wanted. Now, I can feel the edges out there. On the far side are things like power series solutions of differential equations, what my capricious insurance company covers, and how to sharpen a chisel. And each moment, more slips away, making the distance between me and the things I don’t know an ever-widening gulf.

Or is it? Honestly, “Bohemian Gravity” gave me hope. Easy come, easy go: no, I don’t suddenly understand string theory (Tim Blais, the grad student behind this and other videos—including a rendition of Adele’s Rolling in the Deep that was about the Higgs boson—confessed on Twitter that he didn’t really, either).

But I don’t think I should give up on about quantum physics. After all, I now know many new words. I just added Exploring Quantum Physics through Hands-on Projects to my wishlist.

And when I started to read Blais’s thesis, that same amorphous fog of future eureka moments started to drift over me. Maybe I don’t understand all of this right now, but someday I just might. No way, you say? Way.

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Image by Javierdebe via Flickr