Cedar Block’s Solid Results

Turner Hall was, happily, wall-to-wall with the curious last night. They were there for “Sexy Results: Cedar Block’s Dig for the Higgs and How the Quest was Won,” a science-themed variety show conceived and assembled by Brent Gohde, who has been throwing odd bashes like this for well over a decade now. Gohde’s stated intent was to set art and physics on a collision course in order to create something new, a kind of metaphorical representation of what is going on at the semi-retired Fermilab near Batavia, Illinois and CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. And what is going on at Fermilab and CERN? They are smashing together protons at extremely high rates of speed and recreating “The Big Bang” on subatomic levels, then analyzing the tons of terabytes of data these collisions generate so that we may better understand the construct of the universe. The Higgs Boson, the theoretical mechanism that gives particles their mass, might be hiding in these terabyte haystacks. That’s what Quest is. Y’know. It’s all science-y stuff.

So how did it go? WERE THE RESULTS SEXY? Maybe not sexy per se, but entertaining for the most part, informative as long as you were listening, and certainly inspiring if you consider the sheer audacity of putting on a show like this in the Buffalo Wild Wings world we live in. In the weeks building up to Sexy Results, I tried to explain what the show was about to friends and ended up just blurting out “art, music, and particle physics,” a statement that was largely met with that cocked-head kind of look a dog gives you when you whistle at it lightly through yer teeth. There was a bit of that going on in the room last night as well, but not much. Most everyone there seemed to be engaged in the process, and Brent Gohde did a fine job of emceeing/explaining/leading the event.

Gohde struck me as a quietly funny, thoughtful, and genuinely curious guy at relative ease with the challenges of this ambitious show. As Gohde said about midway through the night, it would take a Hollywood-style movie with good looking actors playing sexy scientists to get the average person interested in particle physics. He didn’t have sexy Hollywood actors or actresses on hand for Sexy Results, but it helped that there were actual physicists in the room, sending in messages to the stage via Twitter with comments and corrections like “Neutrinos hardly interact with matter at all.” Lisa Gatewood was a big help. Dressed in red boots and urban-western attire, she brought grace and warmth in all the right places with several acoustic serenades that successfully transformed cold scientific specifics into cowgirl poetics. IFIHADAHIFI brought their Tevatronic supersonics, blasting their way though six new songs they wrote especially for Sexy Results, the highlight of which was “Crash And Divide,” a typically loud but unusually (for them, ha) beautiful (really) song about supercolliders, complete with an all-girl team of backup singers.

Watching IFIHADAHIFI perform “Crash And Divide” for the first time was the evening’s second best moment, edged out slightly by Gohde toward the end of the show, while he was trying to explain the point of Sexy Results. He was hoping that the parents in the room would go home and talk to their kids about science as a viable career option. On a personal level, that rang like an iron bell because my kids were actually there to hear him say it, and as you parents know, it never hurts to have yer arguments bolstered by an impartial influence outside the family. Not long afterward, Gohde read another live tweet from someone in the audience who said “This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever been to, but now I kinda wanna go to Fermilab.” My kids were in agreement with that. Sexy Results was weird, but probably also the coolest thing going on in Milwaukee that night.

Three of my kids are in middle school and they chatted away about atoms, protons and neutrons before they fell asleep on the drive back home. They are studying these things in basic science classes right now. Another is hoping to go into engineering as he nears graduation from high school. Listening to them talk on the way home, I was proud of the curious young people they already are, and who I can see they are becoming. Sexy Results was one more positive building block experience for them to pull up and think about in adulthood.

Mission accomplished everyone.