THE WEEK Gets Even Smarter At World Science Fest
Ben Korman

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You know when you're hanging out with Alan Alda and a bunch of physicists at Columbia University on a Saturday night, something weird is going on. Lucky for us, it was the good kind of weird. The geniuses were swarming at the first annual World Science Festival, which fell on the same weekend as Columbia University’s alumni weekend.

On Saturday night, as the inaugural whiz-fest made a surprisingly theatrical pit-stop at Columbia’s Miller Theatre, Alan Alda (of M*A*S*H lore) revisited his portrayal of legendary physicist Richard Feynman in the Nobel Prize-winning play QED. The performance, sponsored by THE WEEK magazine, was more thespian than Einsteinian (fortunate for those of us mere quasi-brainiacs in attendance), as Alda not only minimized the seemingly inevitable quantum-jargon but ceased to forfeit his distinctive Bronx accent. Not bad, considering Feynman once began a chapter with the words, “A positron, of course, is an electron moving backwards in time” (well, obviously).

 According to THE WEEK’s marketing director, Danielle Yuen, the primary motivation behind the sponsorship was Feynman’s pluralistic approach to problem solving—a philosophy that the publication embraces as well through its patented multifaceted opinion sections.

Following the reading, Alda was joined onstage by a panel of physicists, including Vera Rubin, who is credited with the discovery of dark matter—a thing that not only apparently exists, but drew considerable interest from the audience during the Q&A session. The panel discussed the life of Feynman and the significance of QED in terms of humanizing the science community. It turns out scientists, in fact, are not robots dependent only on a steady diet of rocket fuel and Mythbusters (good to know). All in all, it was an interesting night worth reliving. 

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