- [Narrator] Funding for the Secret Life of Scientists is provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
(logo whooshing) (explosion) (film projector running) (typing) - Being a physics student is pretty exciting.
You get up probably around like eight o'clock in the morning.
I get to class, do a bunch of learning, go to more classes, do a bunch of problems with all my friends.
A lot of it has to do with the math involved and they're long and they take you hours and hours to do, and no sweat.
The next day, hand them in and realize you got half of them right, maybe less.
And then you realize how to do them after much practice.
I am totally flustered.
(chuckles) (film projector running) (logo whooshing) (explosions) (film projector running) (typing) Science and music.
It's almost like I spend half my time with my science and the other half with my music.
I play in a band called "Harry and The Potters" with my brother.
We're both Harry Potter from different points in time.
We wanted to sort of use this band as a tool almost subversively to get kids interested in a sort of musical culture.
Young kids will come to see us and see a sort of raw music that they're not gonna see on MTV or here on the radio.
I remember playing one of our first shows and just seeing a bunch of seven-year-olds head banging and thinking like, wow, we did it.
When the seventh and final Harry Potter book was released, we were able to get a show booked in Harvard Yard.
That's where they do graduation at Harvard every year.
There were thousands and thousands of people that came.
I think the police estimated somewhere between 10 to 15,000 people.
When there's that many people in front of you, you can really only comprehend the first thousand maybe.
After that it's just a wave of heads, sea of faces.
It felt like being Bruce Springsteen at that moment.
This chemistry happens in your brain, that's like this immense joy that all these other people around you are with you on the same page and having a great time at the same time.
It's great when we can create a magical sort of energy.
It's something that transcends language.
You can't communicate that with words.
Science and music are similar in that you can't change the laws of nature and being able to work creatively to solve those problems is kind of similar to being in a band about Harry Potter where you can only write songs about Harry Potter, but try to find creative ways to make those songs exciting.
I know for certain that science and music will always be part of my life.
(film projector running) (logo whooshing) (explosions) (film projector running) (typing) Dude, forget the music industry.
(chuckling) Up the punks.
(typing) I like Richard Feynman a lot.
Einstein is a badass.
(typing) I like lab 'cause you don't fall asleep in the lab and you can fall asleep in the lecture.
(typing) I turned 17 on the first tour.
My parents were a little tentative to let me go but I told them I'd look at some colleges while I was traveling around.
(typing) When I was growing up, I thought, oh, maybe they're all really, really nerdy.
But then when I got to school, I was like, oh, they all work really hard and party hard too.
(typing) Once we got toenails that some girl clipped, that was weird.
(typing) Get real.
(chuckling) (typing) I feel you're work is much more deserved if you get a Nobel prize rather than a platinum album.
(typing) I was in first grade, he brought in this van de Graaff generator one class and then had us all like gather around the classroom and link hands.
Everybody's hair started sticking up like this.
We were conducting electricity.
(buzzing) It was great.
(typing) It's deep.
(chuckling) (film projector running) (logo whooshing) (explosions) (film projector running) (typing) I've been reading a lot of Richard Feynman lately.
He's a physicist.
He got a Nobel prize for his work in quantum electrodynamics.
He sort of has a great way of explaining the universe in a simple way.
He was a great, interesting physics character with a lot of energy and he's slightly eccentric, I guess.
But to be a good physicist it almost seems like they go hand in hand.
(typing) Oh, okay.
(playing guitar) ♪ Dick Feynman ♪ ♪ Dick Feynman ♪ ♪ He played with electrons ♪ ♪ He looked at them on tiny levels ♪ ♪ Quantumly ♪ ♪ Quantum leap ♪ ♪ Dick Feynman ♪ ♪ Dick Feynman ♪ ♪ What ♪ ♪ Dick Feynman ♪ ♪ Dick Feynman ♪ ♪ Played the bongos ♪ ♪ Dick Feynman ♪ ♪ Taught physics ♪ ♪ At Caltech and Cornell.
♪ ♪ Yeah.
♪ What else do you want me to write a song about.
