Last night I went to see a performance at the Paramount Theater here in Austin. The Paramount is one of those gorgeous, old-style, 100 year-old theaters, a premier place to watch a show, with seating for 1,200. I\u2019ve been to plays and Broadway shows there, and seen John Prine, Leo Kottke, Ottmar Liebert and a host of other great musicians. But yesterday\u2019s show, at a ticket price of $50, may have been my most expensive. Who did I see? A physicist, Brian Greene. The author of The Elegant Universe<\/i> talked about quantum mechanics, string theory, and the possibility of parallel universes. <\/p>\n
Are you surprised that a lecture about physics would sell out a theater at $50\/ticket? I am. And the crowd was enthusiastic! There were whistles when he walked on stage. After the 80 minute lecture, he spent 30 minutes answering questions from the audience \u2013 he finally had to call it quits with many hands still in the air. I was also surprised to see how diverse the crowd was: about 50% women (a great date-night event, no doubt), with ages from middle school to geriatric. I watched a mom drop off three cute, young high school girls outside the theater, replete with their spiral notebooks and pencil boxes.<\/p>\n
In a world where Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan command outsized attention, yesterday restored a little faith in humanity for me. Rock on, physics!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last night I went to see a performance at the Paramount Theater here in Austin. The Paramount is one of those gorgeous, old-style, 100 year-old theaters, a premier place to watch a show, with seating for 1,200. I\u2019ve been to plays and Broadway shows there, and seen John Prine, Leo Kottke, Ottmar Liebert and a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}