In 2008, Gene Weingarten of The Washington Post, won a Pulizer Prize "for his chronicling of a world-class violinist who, as an experiment, played beautiful music in a subway station filled with unheeding commuters."[1]
I have studied this with some of my physics colleagues. Conclusion? It is a load of crap. Here is why: As the reader of the article, we see the "whole"--that is, a world-class violinist who, although "dressed down", is playing beautiful music in the Metro. In reality, each of the commuters saw and heard something completely different. To start with, there was an intelligibility threshold that could be measured in distance from the source. This depends primarily on 1) background noise from people's feet, trains, outside traffic, voices, etc. and 2) acoustics (i.e., echos, reverberation and geometry). I would guess that in this particular situation, most of the commuters would not be able to even KNOW that it is a violin (let alone HOW GOOD) until they were a few meters from the source. Since most of the commuters were walking at a speed of 2 meters per second, they probably had about 3 seconds in which to shift their morning groggy "got to get to work" thoughts to "there is a violinist". Further, the sight did not match the sound. Perhaps it would have been different if he were wearing a tux (a scientific control!!!).
But alas, the Mr. Weingarten was not a scientist. Unfortunately for the Pulizer judges, it could come across that they awarded the prize because the "chronicling" seemed to be an attempt to provide evidence that "nobody cared" (an implied hypothesis) when in fact a closer look revealed that conclusions were impossible to draw.
Aiyeee!
[1] http://www.pulitzer.org/citation/2008-Feature-Writing
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