Who cares about physics today? A marketing strategy for the survival of fundamental science and the benefit of society

It is often said that the major stumbling block for doing scientific outreach is money because of funding issues. Ignoring that the true issue is the lack of time and/or inclination on the part of practicing scientists, this statement is too generic to be quantitative or even complete: in fact, as for every project or investment, the discussion should be based on context and impact. Initiatives are at hand to do outreach that cost nothing more than the budget already in place for a University, its Departments and its scientific research groups: it is more a matter of capitalizing existing assets at a University in a concerted way and taking full advantage of these assets by means of synergetic collaborations. I will describe one such collaboration among the School of Dance and the Astronomy and Physics Departments at the University of Maryland: the dance performance ``Gravity,'' inspired by gravitational-wave astronomy. Similar types of partnerships represent new promising ways of doing science communications according to what can be rightly called a marketing strategy (http://arxiv.org.abs/1210.0082).