What We Talk About When We Talk About Physics
Two plays we read this semester, End Days and Arcadia, included major characters who care deeply about physics and math. In End Days, Nelson tries to get closer to Rachel by lending her a copy of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and communicating with her through the language of physics. Rachel ends up finding physics fascinating, and she chats with Stephen Hawking about the end of the world while she’s high. In Arcadia, Thomasina and Valentine are working on iterations and chaos theory, and Thomasina is ahead of her time with her discovery of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This semester I also read another play that takes place at the intersection of physics and life—Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, which premiered in London in 1998 and won a Tony Award for Best Play after a production in New York. Copenhagen takes place in the afterlife as Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg (prominent 20th-century physicists) discuss their friendship, physics, and what really happened during their mysterious meeting in Copenhagen during World War II. (What really happened? Historians aren’t certain.) Reading all of these contemporary plays in one semester has caused me to wonder why all these playwrights have written about physics and what a layperson/non-scientist is supposed to gain from discussions of the finer points of chaos theory or a joke about the wave-particle duality of light. I can’t speak for the playwrights, but I can speak as a reader/audience member/physics enthusiast (recreational physicist?) who found all three plays’ discussions of physics fascinating and ultimately quite moving.
I love physics, even (especially!) when I don’t quite understand things, because physicists try to answer some of the most fundamental questions about life: Where did we come from? What are we made of? How did the universe start? How will it end? As it turns out, physicists have some of the same questions that I do. They try to resolve them with math, I explore them through art (in this case, plays), and we all have to deal with them somehow because these questions matter. Described in Copenhagen, the work of Heisenberg and other scientists on atomic bombs blurred the line between science and politics and turned physics into a matter of life and death. As was pointed out during our DRI presentation today, our anxieties about the end of the world and the unpredictable nature of life make an otherwise academic discussion about entropy and chaos into something very personal—how is the world going to end? Global warming? Terrorism? The cooling of the Sun? What’s more likely to cause the end of everything—the Second Coming or the Second Law of Thermodynamics?
We don’t know the answers to all our questions yet, but it’s indescribably exciting to imagine that we might know someday. As Valentine says in Arcadia, “It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.” Nelson says the same thing to Rachel in End Days. I want a lot of things. I want to fall in love and change the world and all that. Whatever. But I really want is for somebody to come up with an equation that integrates relativity and quantum mechanics. Even if that never happens, however, I’m comforted by what Stephen Hawking says to Rachel in End Days: “The cake is in the search. Finding out is the icing.” And as Hannah says in Arcadia, “It’s the wanting to know that makes us matter.” It’s “the wanting to know” that End Days, Arcadia, and Copenhagen are concerned with—it matters, and it makes the characters matter to me.
A postscript: If physics doesn’t blow your mind, then I hope this video does. If T-Pain were to meet up with PBS in order to Auto-Tune the universe, this is what it would sound like:
Thanks for a great semester, everybody!