Keith Earle is an associate professor of physics in UAlbany's College of Arts and Sciences. He has collaborated with Albany's Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company to research what dance reveals about laws in physics.
Keith Earle is an associate professor of physics in UAlbany's College of Arts and Sciences. He has collaborated with Albany's Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company to research what dance reveals about laws in physics.
The UAlbany News Podcast is hosted and produced by Sarah O'Carroll, a Communications Specialist at the University at Albany, State University of New York, with production assistance by Patrick Dodson and Scott Freedman.
Have a comment or question about one of our episodes? You can email us at mediarelations@albany.edu, and you can find us on Twitter @UAlbanyNews. This show is available on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Radio Public, Spotify, iHeart Radio and TuneIn.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Welcome to the UAlbany News Podcast. I'm your host Sarah O'Carroll. With me today is Keith Earle an associate professor in UAlbany's Department of Physics. He has collaborated with Albany's Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company to research what dance reveals about laws of physics.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Keith, I'm imagining Sir Isaac Newton doing a plie, but just blocking that out for a moment. What got you interested in this project and what exactly are you looking at or studying?
Keith Earle:
I became interested in this project when I was teaching electricity and magnetism to undergraduates. And one of the concepts that you have to get across to the students is the notion of what is a field, what is an electric field, what is a magnetic field? And that can be difficult to do because these are intangible things. So for example, in a mechanics course you can talk about balls rolling down inclined planes and you can visualize that very easily. And so I was kind of stuck trying to come up with images that would make the concepts of fields come alive.
Keith Earle:
And so to take a break from that, my wife dragged me off to a dance concert, which seems as far removed from the concepts of fields as you might ever wish to experience.
Sarah O'Carroll:
So you are not a dancer yourself?
Keith Earle:
No, no. I am a musician, but that's perhaps a separate discussion.
Keith Earle:
So we went to this concert of the Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company and they were doing an extended piece, which was also a collaboration called Spill Out. And what the piece was was it was based around a tube structure that had spandex bands placed between the elements of the support structure and then the dancers could spill out of the structure and then the spandex would bring them back in. And this is very similar to the configuration of electromagnetic fields that I was trying to describe to my students. That there would be a direction of propagation of a light wave and then the electric and magnetic fields in some sense, spill away from the direction of propagation and then come back.
Keith Earle:
So I thought that that was a very compelling visual image. And I went up to Ellen after the concert and asked if there might be a way to collaborate on exploring the idea of can the idiom of dance, specifically modern dance, provide insights into some very basic principles of physics.
Sarah O'Carroll:
What was her reaction? Was she immediately on board or how did you explain your idea in order to think of how this collaboration might manifest itself?
Keith Earle:
Right. Well there was a process of discussion. I think if I may speak for her that I think that Ellen was at least interested in the idea, but it took a while. It took a couple of meetings for us to discuss what might be possible and then it was a question of pulling together the various resources. Time on her part, monetary support for the project and availability of everyone. And finally the stars aligned and we were able to put the piece together while I was on sabbatical a few years ago.
Keith Earle:
And I just wanted to say that a person who played a key role in making all this possible was Kim Engel of the Performing Arts Center here at UAlbany.
Sarah O'Carroll:
And what was her role on the project?
Keith Earle:
She coordinated, she was sort of the liaison between the Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company and me. And also worked behind the scenes to make sure that all of the necessary administrative stuff such as booking rehearsal space, booking performance space and so on, all happened. So she played a key role.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Oh, very neat.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Now can you walk us through maybe some more examples of something you knew or thought you knew in physics that could test specifically in dance. And how did you go about doing that? I know you talked about electromagnetic fields and that concept with the rubber bands, but are there other examples that you can share?
Keith Earle:
I was thinking about one of the last dance phrases in the piece, Texture of the Whole, that came out of the collaboration that Ellen and I worked on. And that's essentially a goodbye phrase. It wraps up the piece I think and ends on a quiet note. But it demonstrates a number of the different kinds of motions that can take place.
Keith Earle:
For instance, as the moon orbits about the earth. It can move closer to the earth or farther away. It can wobble on its axis. That's a motion called nutation. It can also rock back and forth as it's nutating and precessing and orbiting. And that rocking motion is called the libration. And just for me just seeing this quiet goodbye with these various different kinds of motions displayed, the nutation, precession, libration, is very evocative for me. And I think anyone who's clued in to that kind of motion would find it very compelling. But it also stands alone as an artistic expression. And that was the interesting point that these dance phrases developed out of a notion of using dance to describe physics concepts, but they are also on their own terms an artistic statement.
Sarah O'Carroll:
I was curious about that, the relationship between dance and physics as being something symbiotic. You chose dance for your work in physics, but on the other side it sounds like there are some benefits for the dance community in what you're learning and studying.
Keith Earle:
Right. So when a scientist tackles a problem, he uses what I'll call scientific license to remove things that aren't essential to describe or to study the phenomenon. And that's perhaps best thought of as a process of analysis. Now, what I observed Ellen doing, and I assume it's the same for most choreographers, is that she takes atoms of gestures and very short phrases of movement and then incorporates them into larger and larger pieces until she has a complete dance phrase. And that's a process of synthesis. So we're working on the same road, but I'm taking a more analytic approach and Ellen is taking a more synthetic approach, putting things together. And it was interesting to me that there's a same or a similar process of license going on. In my case, I called it scientific license and in the case of Ellen and the dancers, they are exercising artistic license.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Very cool. Now, one of the really interesting aspects of this work is connecting the science with the art, as you've been talking about. And these fields of human endeavor don't typically overlap or intersect and yet a dialogue between them really seems to enrich your understanding and appreciation of both. Do you have any other thoughts on this?
Keith Earle:
I think the idea that there's a tension between science and art can be a useful one. I think perhaps it's sometimes unnecessarily overblown that there are these two non overlapping areas, you know the artistic program and the scientific program. I think that there's a lot of creativity involved in both and essentially both programs, both the scientific and the artistic are involved in problem solving. And although the tools may differ, I think anyone who's been clued into that can recognize the hard work, the discipline in developing the tools for expressing oneself either as an artist or a scientist. And so in many ways the two areas are closer than one might imagine on a casual acquaintance. Which is not to say that there aren't important differences between the two. There are, it's just that I think the differences sometimes get heightened at the expense of recognizing that there are commonalities.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Now I am just curious, what did your wife think about the project? You said you got dragged to see a dance performance, so how has that changed your opinion?
Keith Earle:
I say dragged because I was an assistant professor at the time and very much involved in meeting the demands of the job. But it made me realize that to be a more effective teacher, it was useful to cast my nets wider. So I've made an effort to be more aware of other artistic opportunities to see whether they could influence my teaching.
Keith Earle:
One thing that occurred just recently this summer, I've been doing conference hopping. That is to say going from scientific conference to scientific conference, presenting some new results that have nothing to do with my dance projects. But it does intersect in an interesting way. And at these conferences, as I say, I was presenting some new results and at one point I had a movie, an animation of a protein moving in solution. And I realized that I could show that movie. But taking a page from my collaboration with Ellen, I decided that I would demonstrate the slow overall tumbling motions of the protein by doing some slow large body motions. And then I would demonstrate some of the more rapid internal motions such as backbone motion by doing a shoulder shimmy, which [crosstalk 00:11:07]
Sarah O'Carroll:
So you shimmied in class is what you're saying?
Keith Earle:
This is at the conference.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Oh at the conference, okay.
Keith Earle:
Right.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Right.
Keith Earle:
And then in addition, there's a a spin label that is attached to the protein, which is what I actually look at when I'm doing a magnetic resonance experiment. And then I shook my arm with lots of elbow and wrist action to demonstrate that. And then for the grand finale, I put all of those together.
Keith Earle:
Now I could have shown the movie, but I think it was more evocative for my listeners to see the gross overall motions of the protein, the more rapid internal motions and also the motions of the probe.
Keith Earle:
And afterwards a couple of folks came up to me and and said, "You must really get good teaching scores." And I thanked them and then it occurred to me that one of the things that made it work was that I was conveying or communicating an obvious enthusiasm for the material. And this semester I'm teaching a course in optics, which is new to me. And so one of the things I've been doing is as I prepare my lecture material, I've been asking myself the question, "Okay, what is it about this material that first caused me to be excited as a student and can I convey that same excitement?" And so that was a very salutary lesson to experience this summer. And I'm hopeful that it's translating into more engaged students in the classroom.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Very neat. I am just thinking of how there's so many different ways you can learn and a lot of people learn visually or if you're a dancer you learn through muscle memory. How to do something as well as other clues. So it's interesting to see how you've incorporated it in your teaching.
Keith Earle:
That's right. Different kinds of students learn in different ways. There are those who have to experience things as motion. They have a kinesthetic way of learning. There are those who have to see it, a visual mode of learning, that's probably closest to the way I learn. I'm most likely a visual learner. And then there are others who have to hear it in order to understand it. So depending upon the kind of student, there are going to be different teaching techniques that are more effective. And I think perhaps the kinesthetic or movement based way of teaching has perhaps gotten short changed. And so this work with Ellen and my own explorations have perhaps allowed me to address this imbalance.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Very neat. Keith, thank you so much.
Keith Earle:
My pleasure. Thank you.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Thank you for listening to the UAlbany News Podcast. I'm your host Sarah O'Carroll and that was Keith Earle an associate professor in UAlbany's Department of Physics. You can let us know that you found the episode by emailing us at mediarelations@albany.edu and you can find us on Twitter @UAlbanyNews.