Emlyn Hughes

Emlyn Hughes is a Physics Professor at Columbia. He is known for his work at CERN on the Large Hadron Collider, and for Froscanity.

Froscanity

On Monday, February 18th, around 400 first-year students crowded into Horace Mann Hall to attend Frontiers of Science. The lecture was to be the first in a series on Physics, lead by Emlyn Hughes. Shortly after 11:00am, the lights in the roomed were dimmed. When they came back on, professor Emlyn Hughes was onstage, alone.

Lil Wayne's version of "Drop It Like It's Hot" then began to perform, as Emlyn Hughes removed his sweatshirt in front of a projection of a skull. After stripping off his shirt and pants, he stood in his underwear with his back to the room, and then put on a new set of clothing. Once he had finished changing, he proceeded to curl up in the fetal position in a chair, and remain still for several minutes.

Then, as footage from the 9/11 attacks flashed across the screen, two actors dressed as ninjas came onstage, placed paper maché cats on two stools, and then speared one of the cats with a samurai sword and launched it into the crowd.

For the last minute of the performance, Hughes continued sitting in the chair, as the footage switched from Operation Desert Storm, to Soviet Russia, to nuclear proliferation.

Finally, after five minutes, the music and images stopped. Hughes got up from the chair, and proceeded to launch into an hour-long lecture on Quantum Mechanics with no mention of the incident.

Video from the incident