ESVA x Taylor Swift

As I write this post, Taylor Swift has had a huge year. Her Eras Tour wrapped last December as the highest-grossing tour of all time , she dropped her 12^th studio album (Life of a Showgirl), and she got engaged to Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. She also finally reclaimed the copyright to her master recordings after a years-long dispute and after re-recording almost all of her albums. I don’t consider myself a Swiftie per se, but I am endlessly fascinated by her and the way society reacts to her, both positively and negatively.

So, in honor of her birthday (which is tomorrow, December 13—Happy Swiftday to all those who celebrate), I thought I would look through the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives and suggest alternative album art (yes, for all 12 albums, buckle up) for her next series of re-releases. You know, just in case she needs ideas.

Taylor Swift (2006)

Taylor’s self-titled debut album hit our iPods (remember those?) in October 2006. The break-out hit was “Teardrops on My Guitar ,” a plaintive country-pop ballad that resonated with teenage girls everywhere (yours truly included). For better or worse, it cemented Swift’s reputation as an artist who writes about love (often unrequited) and relationships (often ended).

This photo of H. Richard Gustafson fits the solo singer-songwriter vibes of that first album, but hopefully he was happier than the teenage narrator of “Teardrops.” A research scientist for the University of Michigan for 50 years (1968-2018), Gustafson led experiments at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, Argonne Lab, and Fermilab, focusing on hadronic physics and neutrino physics. Notably, he also worked on the CERN L3 Experiment, led by Nobel laureate and University of Michigan alum Samuel C. C. Ting .

Fearless (2008)

Although one of the biggest (and most enduring) hits from Taylor’s second album, Fearless, is “Love Story ,” I couldn’t pass up this image from the Segrè Collection to represent the title song . As I wrote about earlier this year, Emilio Segrè and his wife Elfriede visited the U.S. during the summer of 1936 so that Emilio could attend the University of Michigan Summer Symposium and visit Ernest Lawrence’s Berkeley Lab. While in California, the couple rented a car to explore some of the national parks, where they ran into some of the local fauna. My first instinct upon meeting bears in the wild would be to lock the doors and drive away, but the Segrès were built different—Emilio got out of the car to take a picture while Elfriede (who was pregnant) leaned out the door to say hi to the bears. Head first, fearless.

Speak Now (2010)

Keeping with her new-album-every-two-years pace, Speak Now was Taylor’s third studio album and began to mark her transition from teenager to young adult. The theme of the album is about imagining the things she left unsaid, or, from another perspective, the things her audience never heard.

Enter Bell Labs. In this experiment, Bell Labs engineers researched the ways people locate the direction of sound. Microphones were placed in the ears of the extra head (named Oscar II; it is unclear what happened to Oscar I), and test subjects wore the head so that the motions of their head would be reproduced by the dummy while they listened for different sounds. The researchers were able to determine that the intensity of sound is more important than was previously thought—if the sound reached one ear first but was louder in the other ear, the hearer became completely confused. Something to think about, the next time you want to say something but don’t necessarily want the other person to understand.

Red (2012)

Red was Taylor’s fourth album and the first one to be explicitly designated as a breakup album, with hits like “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together ” (like, ever) and “I Knew You Were Trouble .” It was also the last album to be marketed as a country album, although critics questioned its categorization as such. This album came out when I was in college, and one of the songs that really takes me back is “22 .”

Incidentally, Emilio Segrè (far left, in uniform) was 22 in this picture, and it’s really giving “I’m feeling 22” vibes. After he finished his degree at the University of Rome La Sapienza, he joined the Italian army as mandated by Italy’s conscription law—hence the uniform. After officer training school, he was stationed back near Rome at Forte Braschi, so he likely saw his school friends with some regularity. This picture must have been taken at one of those times, and they look like they’re having a great time and feeling 22.

1989 (2014)

1989 completed Taylor’s transition from country songstress to full-fledged pop princess. During the writing process, she relocated from Nashville to New York City, another marker of her sonic transition and encapsulated by the first song on the track list, “Welcome to New York .”

Nearly a hundred years prior, Albert Einstein was also welcomed to New York. He made his first visit to the U.S. in April 1921 after the 1919 solar eclipse that proved his theory of relativity. The announcement of the eclipse catapulted Einstein to public recognition , and thousands of people lined the streets of New York as his motorcade passed. The trip was in part a fundraising effort to establish the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which was opened in 1925 and today houses the Albert Einstein Archives. He eventually settled permanently in New Jersey at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, having left Germany in 1932 due to the rise of the Nazi party.

Reputation (2017)

Ah, Reputation. Arguably the most controversial of Taylor’s albums when it was released, you either loved it or hated it. Either way, you almost definitely heard it—the second single, “...Ready for it? ” was teased on ESPN as part of an ad for that year’s Florida State vs. Alabama matchup, and “Delicate ” was one of the biggest hits from the album.

Despite their dainty appearance, glass fibers are actually not that delicate. Although each fiber is no thicker than a human hair, they can withstand considerable stress once coated with a protective polymer. First manufactured in the 1960s as a means of sending light signals, which could travel farther than radio, along a defined path, these thin glass fibers are today used in fiber optic telecommunications all over the world. The first fiber optic cables were created by Corning Glass, but Bell Labs was the group that maximized their potential and made fiber optic telecommunications viable .

Lover (2019)

Lover marked a return to a slightly softer, more acoustic sound after the highly produced and somewhat aggressive nature of Reputation. A meditation on love of all kinds, Lover earned Taylor her second Global Recording Artist of the Year award, given for the best-selling solo album (she previously won for 1989).

One of the most iconic physics couples that embodies the title track is Marie and Pierre Curie. We (and others) have written extensively about Marie (see for example our web exhibit ), so I won’t go into much detail here. In short, the Curies met when Marie was looking for lab space, and Pierre’s was suggested by a mutual acquaintance. Although Marie ultimately found space in a different lab, the two formed a friendship that eventually blossomed into romance, and they married in a simple civil ceremony in July 1895. They also joined forces in the lab and together discovered polonium and radium, earning the Nobel Prize for their work in 1903.

Folklore (2020)

Released right on the heels of Lover and written during early quarantine in 2020, Folklore was a departure from Taylor’s long track record of autobiographical songwriting. On the album, she experiments with fictional narratives, including a set of three songs that each portray one side of a teenage love triangle: “Betty ,” “Cardigan ,” and “August .”

Another teenage Betty (although hopefully one with less heartbreak) was Betty Jane Meggers , daughter of physicist William F. Meggers. William specialized in spectroscopy, but he was also an archaeology enthusiast. Betty was the eldest child of William and his wife Edith, and she grew up to become a well-known archaeologist. She got her start in anthropology at age 16 as a volunteer with the Smithsonian but made the transition to archaeology during college and graduate school. She was best known for her work in South America, and she published nearly two hundred articles, book reviews, translations, and books throughout her long career.

Evermore (2020)

Very much in the same musical vein as Folklore, Evermore was surprise-released in December the same year. No December album would be complete without a holiday song, and although it’s not the traditional upbeat variety, “’Tis the damn season ” is Evermore’s contribution to the pantheon.

In 1944, during the height of WWII secrecy around the Manhattan Project, Santa Claus tried to get into Oak Ridge National Laboratory, ostensibly to deliver presents to children. Manhattan Project photographer Ed Wescott captured the moment Santa was detained by the Oak Ridge guards at Elza Gate. It became a tradition thereafter for Santa to visit Oak Ridge for the annual Christmas party only to have his bag of presents searched for contraband before being permitted entrance. ‘Tis the damn season, indeed.

Midnights (2022)

Back to autobiographical songwriting. Taylor announced Midnights at the 2022 MTV Video Music Awards in August, and the album was released in October. The album is framed as a series of nocturnal reflections, especially on her personal life and public image. When the single “Bejeweled ” debuted, Taylor became the first artist to claim all ten spots on the Billboard Hot 100 chart at the same time.

Maria Goeppert Mayer was bejeweled when she attended the Nobel Prize award ceremony on December 10, 1963. Educated at the University of Göttingen, where she studied with Max Born, she moved to the U.S. in 1939 with her American husband, Joseph Edward Mayer. She had some trouble finding a position due to anti-nepotism laws, but she eventually ended up working in nuclear physics at the Argonne National Lab. She was one of three winners of the Nobel Prize in 1963 for her work with J. Hans D. Jensen “for their discoveries concerning nuclear shell structure.” The December ceremony was, as always, attended by Swedish royalty, and she was escorted by King Gustav himself.

The Tortured Poets Department (2024)

The Tortured Poets Department came out partway through the Eras Tour, and the songs were inspired by the increased scrutiny on Taylor’s life during that period, including her breakup with long-term boyfriend Joe Alwyn. The symbolism of a typewriter comes up repeatedly throughout the album, especially in the title song .

It may be hard to remember today, but typewriters were ubiquitous prior to the adoption of the personal computer in the 1980s and 90s. Everyone from poets to dissidents used them as an alternative to handwriting. Elena Bonner, shown here with her typewriter, was a well-known human rights activist in the Soviet Union, especially after the Prague Spring of 1968. She met physicist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov in 1970 when they both attended the trial of fellow human rights activists in Kaluga, Russia. Sakharov was arrested and exiled to Gorky in 1980, and Bonner joined him under arrest in 1984. They were permitted to return to Moscow in 1986. Sakharov died a few years later, in 1989, but Bonner continued her activism in both Russia and the United States (where her children lived) until her death in 2011 at age 88. You can read more about her in this New York Times profile , published just after her death.

Life of a Showgirl (2025)

We made it! Life of a Showgirl is the latest addition to the Taylor Swift discography, released just a couple of months ago in October 2025. Written during the Eras Tour and reflecting on her fame and her budding romance with Travis Kelce, it is decidedly more lighthearted than her previous albums. That said, the title track is a little more melancholy, as it evokes a glimpse of what it’s like to be a star, with people wanting to have your life without fully understanding what it entails.

One of the biggest stars today in physics, at least to the public, is Neil deGrasse Tyson. Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York City, Tyson is, for many, the public face of astrophysics (notwithstanding a series of sexual misconduct allegations in 2018). His work on television and podcasts to popularize science has earned him several accolades and turned him into a bit of a “showgirl.” This is not to be demeaning—it’s critically important for science communicators like Tyson (and Carl Sagan, Bill Nye, Katie Mack, and others) to be able to explain why the work of scientists matters in a way that non-experts can understand. But celebrity often comes with a cost, and we’ll never really know the life of a showgirl, babe.

That’s it for our ESVA x Taylor Swift crossover! Thanks for reading this far, and if you have ideas for other pop culture intersections, feel free to send them to nbl@aip.org . Until then, I had a marvelous time ruining everything .

Further Reading

Albert Einstein’s Visit to the United States:

• “One Hundred Years Ago, Einstein Was Given a Hero’s Welcome by America’s Jews” (Smithsonian Magazine )
• Albert Einstein: Image and Impact (AIP Web Exhibit )

Fiber Optics:

• “The Fiber Lightguide” (Physics Today )
• “How Charles Kao Beat Bell Labs to the Fiber-Optic Revolution” (IEEE Spectrum )
• “The Idea Factory: How Bell Labs Created The Future” (NPR )

Marie and Pierre Curie:

• Marie Curie and the Science of Radioactivity (AIP Web Exhibit )

Anti-Nepotism Laws:

• Struggle for Employment: Anti-Nepotism Laws in the Academy (AIP Teaching Guide)

Elena Bonner and Andre Sakharov:

• “Elena Georgievna Bonner, a True Human Rights Activist for 40 Years” (New York Times )
• Soviet Physics, Nuclear Weapons, & Human Rights (AIP Web Exhibit )