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Tag archives: theatre
Science, scepticism and fear at the theatre
Sceptical siblings: Olivia Williams (left) and Olivia Colman in Mosquitoes by Lucy Kirkwood. (Courtesy: National Theatre/Brinkhoff & Mogenburg)
By Tushna Commissariat
Working at Physics World for the last six years has taken me to some pretty cool labs – everywhere from CERN to the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO). My job has allowed me to meet some quite famous people too…at least in the world of physics, that is. But getting to spend a morning at the National Theatre in London watching Olivia Colman and Olivia Williams rehearse for a play is not usual even for me. That is precisely why I jumped at the chance, when I found out that the pair star as sisters in the recently opened play Mosquitoes.
You may be wondering what a play with that moniker has to do with physics. Mosquitoes tells the story of rational and lucid Alice (played by Williams), a particle physicist at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and her often-illogical sister Jenny (played by Colman) “who spends a lot of time Googling” and is easily swayed by the bad science she chances upon. Written by Lucy Kirkwood and directed by Rufus Norris – the National Theatre’s current artistic director, the play follows the siblings through a family tragedy, as well as the fairly disastrous switching on of the LHC in 2008, and takes a hard look at our relationships with science, facts, belief and so much more. Kirkwood, whose previous successes include Chimerica and The Children, was commissioned to write the play by the Manhattan Theatre Club as part of its Alfred P Sloan Foundation initiative, which aims to “stimulate artists to create credible and compelling work exploring the worlds of science and technology and to challenge the existing stereotypes of scientists and engineers in the popular imagination”.
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Physics graduate is just 14, high drama at the LHC, the physics of number two
By Hamish Johnston and Michael Banks
Carson Huey-You was just 11 years old when he arrived at Texas Christian University to study physics. Now, at the ripe old age of 14, he is about to graduate, according to an article in the Huffington Post. “I knew I wanted to do physics when I was in high school, but then quantum physics was the one that stood out to me, because it was abstract,” says Huey-You. Most American children start high school at age 14, but Huey-You was learning calculus by the time he was three – a subject usually reserved for high school seniors. And precociousness runs in the family because his younger brother Cannan is starting university in September aged 11. The siblings are delightful and interviewed in the above video.
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3D neutrinos on your phone, Hamiltonian: an Irish Musical, is a March for Science a good idea?
By Hamish Johnston
How would you like to explore a giant neutrino detector in 3D from the comfort of your mobile phone? VENu is a new smartphone app that allows you explore the physics underlying the MicroBooNE neutrino detector at Fermilab. Developed by Alistair McLean of New Mexico State University and an international team of physicists, the app is used in conjunction with the Google Cardboard headset to provide users with a virtual-reality experience of MicroBooNE. VENu includes games that offer “brain teasing challenges” including working out how to spot a neutrino event in a busy background of cosmic-ray events. The app can be downloaded free of charge from the Apple Store and the Google Android Marketplace.
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Chasing gravitational waves in song, physicists on Broadway, the ‘impossible space engine’ returns
By Hamish Johnston
These days anyone making a major breakthrough in physics is expected to follow-up with a cheesy music video. So give it up for The Mavericks and “Chasing the Waves”, which chronicles the quest to detect gravitational waves – which culminated in LIGO’s success earlier this year. I don’t much about this video, but it seems to have been filmed at the University of Glasgow, which is part of the LIGO collaboration.
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LHC to hit the stage
By James Dacey
First there was the LHC rap then the media bonanza for the big September switch-on; also playing their part were the harbingers of doom – foretelling apocalypse from Geneva’s ‘black hole machine’.
Now CERN’s (in)famous experiment is about to get even more dramatic as it provides the fictional setting for a new theatre production.
The Gentlemen’s Tea Drinking Society is produced by Ransom Theatre Company who bill it as “a fast and funny exploration of science, friendship, sexuality and the end of everything as four men face the truth on one fateful night”.
The play was written by Richard Dormer who made a name in 2003 with his internationally-acclaimed portrayal of the talented-yet-troubled snooker legend Alex “Hurricane” Higgins. It also contains an original score by Belfast born DJ David Holmes who produced the music for Ocean’s Twelve and Out of Sight.
Dormer and Co haven’t revealed much about the plot other than it centres around four men in a room, one of whom is a physicist harbouring a very big secret – he’s found the Higgs boson.
This is not the first time physics has taken to the stage. Famous examples include Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (1993) — a look at the life of Byron which incorporated ideas from thermodynamics and chaos theory; and Michael Fryan’s Copenhagen (1998) — a play built around a 1941 conversation between Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg about the nature of the quantum world.
More recently American composer John Adams created an opera based on The Bomb and its creation at the Manhattan project. Dr Atomic premiered in 2005 and finally comes to London this February.
The Gentlemen’s Tea-Drinking Society launches on 4 February at Belfasts’s Old Museum before going on tour across Ireland until 10th March. Later in the year it will appear in Glasgow and London.
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