Last night’s event was wonderful. The actors had such passion, and it was all done with great pacing and flow. This was a most marvellous play reading – the cast’s performances felt so fully inhabited by the text of the play that it hardly felt like a reading at all.
They (Nike Doukas as Margrethe Bohr, Arye Gross as Neils Bohr, and Leo Marks as Werner Heisenberg) and director Jack Rowe, should be very proud. They did very little rehearsal for this, which is makes it all the more impressive.
I gave an opening address* (and also introduced the evening**, as usual forgetting to introduce myself…) and the text of my address follows:
Good evening and welcome!
Yesterday, the Nobel Prize in Physics was announced. You might recall that it was for the discovery of the mechanism that gives all elementary particles their masses. A profound mystery about the universe was solved. While that’s a wonderful thing, and many people acknowledge that, many people don’t connect anything about that quest to understand the universe to themselves.
To many, perhaps most, science is about fixing things, or making new tools. – A cure for cancer, a new kind of cell phone, new forms of energy to exploit, etc. It is about that too, but so much more of it is about just wanting to know, for its own sake. Staring into the firmament, and asking why. In doing so, we ultimately look into ourselves, and we discover perspective, connectedness – even meaning.
This all gives us opportunity, leverage, and yes, power. And then we, as scientists, as societies, have to learn how to use these things responsibly. Ethically.
This was happening during the time of the play’s setting, it is happening now (see – stem cells, genomics, energy and climate change; see the internet and privacy), and it will continue to happen.
The science of the Physics Nobel yesterday is the direct continuation of the science that is the subject of the play – Quantum Physics – my field, and the scientists in the play (Bohr and Heisenberg) are two of the giants who discovered and refined the quantum physics. It is a subject that is still alive and well today, providing puzzles about our universe that we must solve, just because they are interesting.
Bohr and Heisenberg helped discover a powerful truth about our universe – It is a quantum universe at the heart, not a classical one: Newton’s universe is only an approximation to something far more nuanced. And just as I said, in getting closer to how our universe worked (in this case, the workings of atoms) humankind discovered new levers, new opportunities, new power, and therefore new responsibilities.
This is the subject of the play, and in the spirit that I mentioned of finding ourselves in the science, Michael Frayn, the playwright, also weaves the core scientific principles into the humanity of the play, and even the mechanics of the play.
A core theme of the play – and of quantum physics itself – is indeterminacy, and complementarity. Certain things cannot be known with arbitrary precision. Sometimes it does not even make sense to pin down the precise answer to certain questions. A lot of physics (we now know) boils down to figuring out exactly what it makes sense to measure, and what you cannot measure, in a given situation. Trying to control the rest is futile, and meaningless.
So much of Nature’s richness and nuance is in the freedom that lies between those measurements. As the play unfolds, look for that in the science, and look for it in the humanity of Bohr, Heisenberg, and Margrethe. It is not an accident that you find it in both places, for they are inextricably linked.
-cvj
*Thanks for the photo aef!
**My only regret is that (as usual with these events) a lot of people who wanted to come missed it because the RSVP system showed the event as full, but of course so many of those people who filled it up early on did not bother to come. So we could have had another 25-30 people in that wonderful new theater space if not for such selfish abuse of the system. Ironically, had they paid money for those tickets, they’d have showed up. I don’t know how to fix this, but it bugs me every time.
