Science and Love. Eternal opposites (in some views). But if XKCD can combine them in a comic, surely someone has written a song that combines the two. Any examples?
The best one I can think of is by an obscure group from the 90s called the Jazzabels, with Cole Porter-ish lyrics along the lines of “Science says that gravity is a natural attraction/ So love is not a mystery, but a natural reaction……Falling, falling, all of us are always falling/ so why not fall in love with me/ I’ll fall in love with you”. (sadly, can’t find it on-line).
Or, at a stretch, “What a Wonderful World” (“Don’t know much about geography/don’t know much trigonometry”),
What else?
[Please, let’s not mention “She Blinded Me With Science”. Despite the title, that song is actually neither about love nor science, and in fact I’m not sure actually qualifies as a song.]
Hey! “She Blinded Me With Science” is a pretty good song!
Though I can’t point at one specifically at the moment, Rush has done a lot of songs with science themes so there’s probably at least one in there that touches on love.
“Now the thing about time is that time
Isn’t really real
It’s just your point of view
How does it feel for you
Einstein said he could never understand it all
Planets spinning through space
The smile upon your face…”
I guess this is a lot more philosophy than it is science, but Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers’ “Astral Plane” was the first thing I thought of:
Tonight I’m all alone in my room
I’ll go insane if you won’t sleep with me
I’ll still be with you
I’m gonna meet you on the astral plane
The astral plane for dark at night
The astral plane or I’ll go insane
Unless you’ve got your dominance down in your genes
You’ll have a kid, invalid
Just like Mendel’s beans
Oh hold me, you know you are my one and only phenotype
And together we could have a genotype
Hawkwind: “Quark, Strangeness and Charm”
Copernicus had those Renaissance ladies
Crazy about his telescope
And Galileo had a name that made his
Reputation higher than his hopes
Did none of those astronomers discover
While they were staring out into the dark
That what a lady looks for in her lover
Is charm, strangeness and quark?
I fear that I will always be
A lonely number like root three
A three is all that’s good and right,
Why must my three keep out of sight
Beneath a vicious square root sign,
I wish instead I were a nine
For nine could thwart this evil trick,
with just some quick arithmetic
I know I’ll never see the sun, as 1.7321
Such is my reality, a sad irrationality
When hark! What is this I see,
Another square root of a three
Has quietly come waltzing by,
Together now we multiply
To form a number we prefer,
Rejoicing as an integer
We break free from our mortal bonds
And with a wave of magic wands
Our square root signs become unglued
And love for me has been renewed.
*So for awhile we conducted experiments
In an apartment by the River Road
And we found out that the two things we put together had a
Bad tendency to explode
All about chemistry
Won’t you show me everything you’ve learned
I’ll memorize everything you do to me so I can
Teach it when it comes my turn *
I like ABC by The Pipettes. Hot chicks dig geeks, of course.
(BTW: The new incarnation of The Pipettes has finally released a new album. I heard the previews of a couple songs. Not good. Not good at all. Seem to be going into a disco-y direction. Eech.)
You left out my favorite Coulton “science + love” song, “I’m Your Moon” (a sad/happy little number about Charon comforting Pluto for its loss of planetary status):
I’d never watched it before–it’s got a Rube Golberg theme to it.