Kevin Delaney has so much fun with liquid nitrogen, he goes around with a Thermos-like jug of the strange, vapory stuff. It could freeze a man's beard off, even such a nationally famous black beard as Delaney's.
He has liquid nitrogen delivered almost daily to the Museum of Discovery in Little Rock, where he is director of visitor experience.
Odd title maybe, but he worked his way up to it. Four years ago, he took care of the museum's small menagerie of spiders and snakes, a skunk, an alligator. The job led to more educational responsibilities.
He showed a flair that came from his background in theater, and that came from growing up in a family of scientists.
Lately, he is known to The Tonight Show's millions of television viewers as late-night host Jimmy Fallon's science pal, the guy from Arkansas.
Guy in the white lab coat, blue gloves, beard that looks like first contact with an alien. Always up to something, talks at the speed of a particle accelerator, makes things bubble and explode.
"This is the guy I'm talkin' about," as Fallon said in the ping and pong aftermath of Delaney's most recent appearance in May.
Delaney had set off a liquid nitrogen explosion in a tub full of pingpong balls. Thousands of multicolored balls clattered all over the set.
"I'm just a person who loves science," Delaney says. "I want to learn as much as I can and share it."
Ordinarily, he goes about entertaining and educating visitors to the museum in downtown Little Rock's River Market District. There, too, he comes on with a jug of liquid nitrogen.
The super-cold gas pours like bubbling mineral water, so cold that it boils at 321 degrees below zero. It can be used in many practical ways. Blood serum is preserved, and freeze-dried coffee is made with liquid nitrogen.
Delaney, 34, has other ideas. He gathers a crowd in the museum like a rainmaker with a pocketful of thunder.
The museum is a rumpus of summer campers, and a few of the bravest junior scientists nudge forward to see better.
CLOUD THEORY
What would happen, Delaney asks from behind the table between him and his audience -- what if ? ... and having explained the science involved, the convergence of hot with extreme cold ...
He empties a pot of steaming hot water into a frosted-white kettle of liquid nitrogen.
Foomp!
The combination erupts in a rolling cloud that envelops the science educator. He is gone from sight, but no worry.
The cloud dissipates in moments, and he is back to describe how it felt to be a blur inside the billows.
"Really, really cold," he says.
The demonstration is one of his favorites, a small-scale version of another stunt that Delaney performed in The Tonight Show's studio in New York.
FOOOMP!
Playing it big for television, he conjured a cumulus into which he, Fallon and actress Lucy Liu disappeared, and the band, and much of the audience.
It was the second of Delaney's three appearances on The Tonight Show, which had contacted more than 50 science museums around the United States to find a science guy up to the challenge.
Delaney wowed Fallon the first time he came on, in 2014, blasting smoke rings into the audience from a "vortex cannon" made out of a plastic barrel.
"You are the coolest guy," Fallon exclaimed. "I want to hang out with you."
Since airing, the segments have reached millions more viewers on YouTube.com. Delaney fast-talks through a series of experiments, and Fallon credits the Museum of Discovery.
Delaney was back to Arkansas in time to leave again for NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. The space center's Take Our Children to Work Day featured Delaney and his science demonstrations.
Sure sign that a science guy is on the rise: His closest competition is Mars.
CHAIN REACTION
"We've definitely seen an increase in attendance and in social networking -- Facebook, Instagram, Twitter -- we've seen an uptick," Museum of Discovery spokesman Kendall Thornton says.
"People come in from around the country and say, 'We saw him on The Tonight Show.'"
"Kevin's passion is overflowing and contagious," says Ian Beard, formerly an educator at the Old State House Museum in Little Rock, now among the founders of Stone's Throw Brewing.
Stone's Throw provides beer for the Museum of Discovery's "Science After Dark" adult nights, "and I got to see Kevin in action a lot," Beard says. "Neil deGrasse Tyson is able to transmit a similar kind of passion, and people like him and Kevin Delaney are becoming the new face of science in America."
Delaney's wife, Angela, says he was just as enthusiastic about science before he made a show of it.
"I'm not surprised he got into science," she says. "He has scientists in his family," including a marine biologist brother. "Even before this job, he was pretty good at knowing the scientific explanations for things. He's been explaining things to me for a long time."
One thing she has learned: "It's never a simple explanation."
Volunteer coordinator for the Central Arkansas Library System, she was there in New York to watch the pingpong balls blow up. The visit included a backstage glimpse of another of Fallon's guests, the musician Sting. But mainly, she remembers the pingpong balls.
"I'm sure there are some in the studio still," she says, "and some that never came down. It's a big studio."
So now, Delaney's beard is apt to be recognized at least as well as Sting for his stylish bit of chin stubble.
The science guy even signs a few autographs, his wife says. "But people don't do autographs so much anymore, maybe because they don't have any paper. He gets a lot of pictures taken with people. He's in a lot of selfies."
EARLY EXPERIMENTS
Delaney's college studies centered on theater and writing, and left him with the idea of writing a book of ghost stories -- a project for later. He and his wife moved from Rhode Island to her home state, Arkansas.
"I had just moved to Little Rock," he says. "I saw a sign that said, 'Coming soon: the new Museum of Discovery,' and they were hiring. I was hired as an educational programmer."
The former Boy Scout says, "I never was afraid of science." He swears he wasn't the kind of youngster to blow up stuff, "but I took a lot of stuff apart. Sometimes, I put stuff back together."
He admits to a science-related fear of being hit by lightning, "but I don't think that's weird." Who wants to be hit by lightning?
"Science is really how we understand the world," Delaney says. "If nobody explains it to us, how are we going to learn?"
The trick is that understanding science is one thing. Being able to excite other people's interest in science is something else. Do both on the level of national television, and there's no telling how far a pingpong ball might bounce.
"It would be great if Kevin is the next Carl Sagan," Angela Delaney says. "But I think he would be happy being the next Mr. Wizard."
"It's all in how you do it," Delaney says. "Everybody has a different idea. Everybody has a different way of doing things."
Thanks to being the science guy, he says, "I'm getting to have conversations on the most fascinating topics I can think of."
But science needs more than one guy.
"I think everybody should be that guy," he says.
Not everybody can be Stephen Hawking or Mr. Wizard. But the universe has plenty of work to go around.
"There's a lot of interesting stuff out there," Delaney says. "I'll keep busy."
Style on 07/14/2015