Dave Maiullo has been displaying the wonders of physics to Rutgers University students for 38 years and — through his “That Physics Show” — to Off-Broadway audiences for ten.
In both, he demonstrates a talent for presenting complex phenomena in an understandable and fun way — an attribute that will be on display during his free Rutgers Day show on Saturday, April 30.
Here’s how Maiullo makes his magic. For Newton’s third law (For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction), Maiullo sits on a wheeled cart and propels himself with the force of a fire extinguisher. Pressure over force equals area? He lies on a nail-encrusted board, has another placed on top of him, and asks a member of the audience to stand on top. To make sound waves visible, he lights a flame tube, and to the delight of the audience, the waves dance along when he plays music.
Maiullo gives demonstrations for 2,500 physics students at Rutgers every semester. He gave his first demonstration show — summarizing the demos he presents to students during the course of a year — to the public 23 years ago, when he and his former professor Mark Croft began holding Faraday Physics Christmas Shows at Rutgers.
Michael Faraday, who discovered magnetic induction and developed the first dynamo in London in 1831, created the first public science lecture for a young audience. It has been held by the Royal Institution every Christmas since then, except during World War II.
For his own first Faraday Show, Maiullo recalls, “I had stage fright.” But after a few years, he and Croft were holding three shows over the weekend, attended by some 1,500 people. By then, he says, “I had learned how to give presentations. You just have to know what you’re talking about.”
In 2007 Maiullo was invited to give a demonstration for the Secret Science Club, which holds science-based presentations over drinks. He loaded his van and drove to a Brooklyn bar. Although a Nobel Prize-winning biologist also presented that night, a New York Times reviewer covering the club was wowed by Maiullo.
When asked by friends why he bothered driving to Brooklyn to do a show he wasn’t paid for, Maiullo replied, “It may lead to better things.” And presto! The next year, he co-authored the book, “A Demo a Day: A Year of Physics Demos” with educator and Chemistry Show writer Borislaw Bilash.
Maiullo broke into television in 2009 when National Geographic asked him to perform demos and explain the physics behind “stupid tricks people have done, such as having cars driven over them, eating glass, and pulling cars with their eyeballs” for the network’s “Humanly Impossible” series. The offers kept coming: the Science Channel asked him to perform demos for its “Dark Matters” series, he appeared on the Discovery Channel’s “Hell Roads,” and then he filmed demos for the Weather Channel’s “Strangest Weather on Earth” series at Rutgers’ Physics Lecture Hall.
Several years ago, George Street Playhouse founder Eric Krebs, who also started Off-Broadway’s John Houseman, Douglas Fairbanks, and Playroom Theaters, attended a Faraday Show. Krebs, also a professor for Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of the Arts, approached Maiullo about starting an Off-Broadway show. Maiullo says, “He bugged me for 15 years, but my son was still young.”
He finally gave in, and the first “That Physics Show” was held in October of 2015 at the Playroom Theater. One of Maiullo’s former student assistants, Andrew Yolleck, filmed the show, developed a script by watching the recording, and became Maiullo’s understudy. Maiullo recalls, “After the first few months, we were selling out and turning people away.”
The following April, the New York Times reviewed “That Physics Show,” noting, “What Mr. Maiullo does onstage is extremely cool, and not just because the temperature of liquid nitrogen is more than 300 degrees below zero.” The review also noted that the show that combined physics and pyrotechnics was “like having your really hip uncle teach science class.”
Maiullo then appeared on live television in a July 2016 episode of “Live! With Kelly” and asked high heel-wearing host Kelly Ripa to sit on the wheeled cart and brandish the fire extinguisher. Images of the show were used in ads, causing Maiullo to say, “It was weird to see my face on Times Square.”
He adds that “the most out-of-body experience I had was when I won the Drama Desk Award for Unique Theatrical Experience in 2016.” Maiullo, who accepted the award in his usual Einstein t-shirt, says, “I didn’t expect to win.”
Despite the exposure he has received from “That Physics Show” and television, Maiullo says working with the students at Rutgers is truly rewarding. “I get to work with young people and watch them blossom. They’re so smart. I play to their strengths to give them confidence and at the same time put them in situations where they’ll stretch themselves.”
Maiullo’s strategy for engaging his student assistants is as ingenious as his demonstrations. He has them develop their own demos. For example, Maiullo says he told physics student Will Bidle and electrical engineering student Joseph Florentine, “‘I want a pendulum that has a wheel on the bottom to see what it does to the period of the pendulum.’ They researched which materials to use, designed it using CAD, and built it in the machine shop. It’s now our Moment of Inertia pendulum demo.”
Maiullo even names demos after their student creators. The JBeats demo was fashioned by John-Baptiste Kauzya, now pursuing a PhD in mechanical engineering. It demonstrates how two out-of-phase audio speakers cancel each other out, also known as destructive interference. Maiullo points out, “Einstein said you only really understand something when you can explain it to an eight-year-old.”
Maiullo says he got his talent for building from his father, who worked on amtracks (amphibious tracked vehicles) for the Marines during the Korean War. Maiullo says, “He was one of the first computer repairmen.”
Maiullo’s mother had four kids in five years and became the secretary to the assistant superintendent in Hillsborough and, he adds, “did electrolysis at night.” When she came to see Maiullo’s off-Broadway show, she stood on top of her son in his bed-of-nails sandwich.
Maiullo was born in Manville but notes that after his father “saw the asbestos flying around,” the family moved to Hillsborough. When Maiullo was about eight, he looked through his father’s telescope, saw Saturn, and “needed to know more. By the time I was 14, I had 500 books; by the next year I knew I wanted to be in physics.”
Maiullo originally thought of working on plasma physics but didn’t want to spend the time required to get a PhD. However, after he graduated from Rutgers in 1983, he began building a particle detector to find the top quark for them. After installing it, he heard Rutgers was hiring a physics demonstrator and applied, although, he says, “As a student, I never saw a demo.”
Years later, before COVID-19 hit, Maiullo was presenting “That Physics Show” twice a week and presenting demos at schools twice a month in addition to his demos at Rutgers. Some 70,000 people have seen “That Physics Show.” It returns to the Playroom Theater this summer.
Regarding his work, he says, “It makes use of my skill set. I’m a people person, I can communicate, and I understand physics.” Recalling a memorable day at Rutgers, he says, “I brought out a demo to explain a concept. All the students were saying, ‘Now I get it!’ Then this young lady came up to me and said, ‘You presented at my high school several years ago. You’re the reason I’m here, and doing science.’ What’s better?”
The Phenomenal Faraday Physics Show, Rutgers University’s Physics Lecture Hall, 120 Frelinghuysen Road, Busch Campus, Piscataway. Saturday, April 30 (Rutgers Day), 2:30 to 4.p.m. Student physics demos, noon to 2 p.m. Free. Check the Rutgers Day website (www.rutgers.edu/event/rutgers-day-2022) for the latest COVID-19 policy.
To view the live stream of the Faraday Physics Show on April 30, go to https://youtu.be/kVO1QRxzTjA.
That Physics Show, Playroom Theater, 151 West 46th Street, 8th floor, New York City. Reopens mid-July. Online ticket sales begin by the end of May. www.sciencetheatercompany.org.
For information on Dave Maiullo school bookings, email maiullo@physics.rutgers.edu.
