March 2004 SCIENCE TO A SAMBA BEAT We are delighted to offer this report from Rio by our distinguished correspondent, Roald Hoffmann, Nobel laureate in Chemistry and presiding genius of ENTERTAINING SCIENCE, which unfolds downstairs on the first Sunday of every month (this month’s theme is A PLANET IN OUR HANDS). This piece can also be read (for more money) in the March 5 issue of Nature.
	This is the time to be in Rio de Janeiro, in the Carnaval of carnivals. For a week in February the city is a firework of color and music. In a society with vast class differences, these seem to disappear for a few days. A year of work, making costumes, months of wages spent on these, in favelas and upper class neighbor-hoods, leads up to informal block parades, parties, the incessant beat of samba, a binge of popular culture. Some fifty years ago, in a simpler time, Richard Feynman, dressed as a Greek, played a frigideira, a percussion instrument shaped like a frying pan, in a neighborhood Carnaval parade… At the top of this folk festival shading into major commercial production is a competition between samba “schools.” They parade down the Sambódromo, a structure like an elongated football stadium, and seating 100,000. A billion more watch the performance worldwide. The samba schools are judged by their theme, how well it is executed, and their spirit. And they are graded by their floats, the costumes (called fantasias), on their song, the samba enredo, sung by all marching/walking/ dancing (3,000-5,000 people per school!), their bateria—drum corps is a poor translation. Nearly everything about Carnaval is untranslatable! On the basis of their evaluation, schools are promoted or demoted, much as in some European football leagues. The life of a neighborhood depends on their “team’s” placement. No wonder that the major samba schools hire a producer/director to stage their presentation; he or she even has a name, “carnavalesco”. In Brazil this is a great profession. For the first time ever, a major samba school, Unidos da Tijuca, chose a science theme for Carnaval. The theme is “The Dream of Creation and the Creation of the Dream: Art and Science in the Age of the Impossible”. In the elaboration of that theme, the carnavalesco Paulo Barros, an imaginative director, an alchemist really, has worked closely with the team of the Casa da Ciência of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, headed by Fátima Brito. This collective has much experience in popularizing science. But this was something new—it could only be compared to asking scientists to advise on the half-time show at the Super Bowl (and the exposure of the human body on the floats in Rio is light years beyond Janet Jackson’s flirtation with the risqué) or having the Astronomer Royal go on for an hour on Britain’s most popular soap opera. They took it on, the Casa da Ciência people, not without trepidation. For there are doubters in Brazilian science, who claim that the distortion of science in this Carnaval parade only adds to the public’s misperception of science. One should say there also was skepticism in the samba community if this “complicated” theme would fly. What passed in front of millions on the night of Feb. 22 in Rio? A fantastic float made of clock faces, driven by a popular actor, Carlos Palma, dressed as Einstein. A pyramid of 273 men and women, in dark blue body paint, an allegory of life. Lovely bodies dressed as DNA and Dolly the sheep. Androids sambaing down the avenida. There was even an allegory of alchemy moving to chemistry; I couldn’t quite believe that it had orbitals in it, but they sure looked like it to this theoretical chemist. Who was there in a Santos Dumont costume, balloons coming out of my back, like angel wings. Diplomatically avoiding questions on who first discovered flight. Will Carnaval really value this unique inclusion of science in popular culture? To me, the process—a group of people intent on popularizing science in dialogue for a year with a great samba school—I think that's worth it, by itself. Three days after the parade, the judges put Unidos of Tijuca No. 2 (out of 14), the school’s highest ranking ever. An analysis of the ratings by category reveals that the theme and its ingenious, coherent execution got it there. I bet we'll see more science at Carnaval. HOSTED BY: And from slightly closer to home, we are happy to publish this paean to the Poet Laureate of Cornelia Street, the (fill in the blank) Angelo Verga, who holds sway over the subterranean world of spoken word and who moved Helen Tzagoloff under the above title to pen these words (with which what miscreant could cavil?): The amazing The remarkable The witty The sophisticated The genteel The elegant The chic The gorgeous The exquisite The soigné The delicious The sensual The incomparable The electrifying The sexy The thumbs up The one and only ANGELO VERGA

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