The #MannequinChallenge viral-video sensation, in which people act frozen as if a movie were paused mid-action, has already given us some fairly iconic still-life performances. There’s the most-cool-in-school challenge video that may well have started it all. There is what is certainly the most puppets in a mannequin challenge from Sesame Street, and arguably the most Star Wars-iest mannequin challenge featuring storm troopers. Then there’s the superbly meta mannequin challenge from Rae Sremmurd, the duo that wrote “Black Beatles,” which provides the musical dynamism to many of the mannequin challenge’s best tableaus. (An original Beatle getting in on the act also vies for that most meta title.)
But the title of nerdiest mannequin challenge has to go to the team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who managed to pack quite a few deliciously geeky visual references into their take on the challenge. In the video above, keep an eye out for the founders of the California lab, started in 1952 for nuclear weapons research, and the work of a decidedly anti-nuclear scientist of some cosmic reputation. On the whiteboard, there are equations of fundamental importance to students of calculus, although there are others of relative uncertainty. Easter Eggs aside, there are plenty of lab coats, protective goggles, dry-ice fog, and frozen rock-star swagger to make this a fun one even for the non-scientific among us.
