Physicist, philosopher, rock musician

Last month I unexpectedly received a small padded envelope from Howlin’ Wuelf Media of Morrisville, Pennsylvania. Inside was Last Free Man, a CD album by Steve Weinstein. The accompanying cover letter explained why the CD might have been sent to an editor at Physics Today. It began:

With one exception (a cover of Mission of Burma’s “That’s How I Escaped My Certain Fate”), Weinstein wrote, sang, and played guitar on all 11 of the album’s tracks. Accompanying him was an experienced band of musicians, including bassist Sara Lee, formerly of the Gang of Four and the B-52s, and G. E. Smith, who has recorded or toured with Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Tom Waits, Hall & Oates, and was the bandleader on Saturday Night Live for much of the 1980s.

Weinstein and his band have their own characteristic sound. Still, to get an idea what they sound like, think of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers with an admixture of the Cars. Weinstein’s singing sounds somewhat like late 1960s Bob Dylan. That said, the rich, atmospheric sound of my favorite Track, “Storm Warning,” reminded me of Richard Hawley’s 2012 album Standing at the Sky’s Edge .

The album’s title track was the nucleus of the album. In London for a conference on black holes, Weinstein noticed the abundant CCTV cameras that surveil the city’s streets. Although he acknowledged that such devices might be needed in a city that continues to suffer terrorist attacks, he felt uneasy about being constantly watched and monitored. The lyrics came to him on his flight back to the US.

Weinstein is a strong lyricist. The songs sound natural, heartfelt, thoughtful, and, on occasion witty and wry. His rhymes are deft and unforced. My favorite pairs “Melissa” with “kiss her.”

Having listed to Last Free Man three times, I was unable to detect any hint of Weinstein’s interests in theoretical physics and philosophy. To find out more about his two careers, I phoned him for chat.

Weinstein recalls being interested in science and philosophy at a young age. Among the questions the eight-year-old Weinstein asked himself were “What is time?” and “What is the difference between right and left?” At high school, the success with which quantum mechanics can explain chemistry inspired him to become a physicist. Then, as an undergraduate at Princeton University, his early interest in philosophy revived.

When I asked Weinstein what sparked his love of music, he cited a 1970 album that paired Jimi Hendrix’s and Otis Redding’s performances at the Monterey International Pop Music Festival of 1967. That love caught fire in mid and late 1970s when punk rock burst into the music scene. He saw the Clash three times and taught himself to play guitar.

After graduating from Princeton, Weinstein joined the graduate program in philosophy at UCLA. But he gave it up to move back to the East Coast and become a musician. Thanks to his computing skills, he could support himself with part-time jobs, including one with the Baupost Group , which was then a small investment shop housed above an art supply store in Havrard Square. He played solo at open mics in Greenwich Village, New York, and Boston.

You gotta choose!

But he missed philosophy and physics. He took some courses in physics and mathematics at Harvard, then, in 1992, went to graduate school at Northwestern University. After postdoctoral stints at the University of British Columbia, Princeton, and Dartmouth College, he joined the faculty at the University of Waterloo, whose proximity to the then newly founded Perimeter Institute was a decisive attraction.

Weinstein’s current research interests include the physical ramifications of multiple time dimensions and the quest to find a field theory in which correlations between local degrees of freedom can account for entanglement and other quantum phenomena. And in the context of the untestability of much of what string theory describes, he is also investigating the philosophical limits of knowledge.

Having returned to physics and philosophy, Weinstein returned to music after 20 years to make Last Free Man earlier this year. When I asked him what advice would he give someone who feels the pull of two different careers, he recounted what he was told by one of his philosopher mentors: “You gotta choose!”

That advice, in retrospect, made sense to Weinstein. Becoming a philosopher of physicis took time as well as effort. He benefited from having good mentors and being in good departments. He admitted to me that he’d underestimated how hard it was to become a musician. “Writing is easier than singing and performing,” he said. “You have devote yourself to it.”

But devoting yourself to physics or to any other demanding vocation doesn’t mean you can’t change vocation later, Weinstein said. And there are physicists, such as cosmologist Stephon Alexander , who follow Albert Einstein’s example and make music for fun and not for a living.

Weinstein’s Last Free Man will be available on iTunes from 10 December. To listen to samples, visit Weinstein’s website .