When director Ava DuVernay set out to bring the new Disney film adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 book, A Wrinkle in Time, to the big screen, she turned to Hollywood A-list stars like Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon and a not-so-well-known-in-Hollywood-circles Brown University physicist, Dr. Stephon Alexander. No stranger to the intersection of art and science, Alexander helped meld the fantasy with physics for the live-action sci-fi film.
Alexander, a physicist and musician who has straddled the worlds of theoretical physics and jazz music over the last two decades, served as the science advisor on the film and reminded DuVernay’s creative team, “Stay true to the physics and at the same time make sure these wonderful fantasy elements [from the book] are retained,” he said. “That was a big part of the joy and the challenge of working with Ava and the creative team in making that happen.”
In his talk, “The Jazz of Physics: The Link Between Music and The Structure of the Universe,” hosted by the deans of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences and the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, Alexander revisits the interconnection between music, the evolution of astrophysics and the laws of motion. He explores new ways in which music, in particular jazz, mirrors modern paradigms in physics through quantum mechanics, general relativity and the physics of the early universe. Finally, he discusses ways that innovations in physics have been and can be inspired from "improvisational logic" exemplified in jazz performance and practice.
Guest Speaker: Stephon Alexander, Ph.D., professor of physics, Brown University
Date: April 19, 2018
Time: 7 - 8 pm
Place: University of Houston, 3517 Cullen Blvd, Science Engineering Classroom Building (SEC), Room 100 (map)
Parking: Available in the visitors’ section of the Stadium Parking Garage, located on Holman Street near the corner of Cullen Blvd and Holman Street. The parking fee after 4:00 p.m. is $5. The garage is across Cullen Blvd from the meeting location.
RSVP via Eventbrite: https://jazzofphysics.eventbrite.com