[music]
Chris Herzog:
I'm Chris Herzog. I'm an assistant professor
in the physics department. Last year, I ran
Chris Herzog:
the first Princeton science playwriting competition.
This year, I'd like to invite you to listen
Chris Herzog:
to the winning entries. We’re going to have
a staged reading on Monday, Oct. 17 at 8 p.m.,
Chris Herzog:
in Taplin Auditorium.
Erisa Apantaku:
I got the idea for "A Quantum Comedy" last
year in Integrated Science, when we were talking
Erisa Apantaku:
about concepts such as Heisenberg’s uncertainty
principle. I wrote about two guys in a dorm
Erisa Apantaku:
room and I thought that was something that
every college student could relate to.
Minqi Jiang:
So I wrote my play about the "Many Worlds"
interpretation of quantum mechanics, which
Minqi Jiang:
states that whenever an action entails multiple
possible outcomes, the universe splits into
Minqi Jiang:
different versions of itself, one to accommodate
each possible outcome.
Lily Yu:
Wu Chien-Shiung was a Chinese-American physicist
famous for violating the law of parity in
Lily Yu:
1953 in an elegant experiment at the national
bureau of standards in D.C. She came to Princeton
Lily Yu:
in 1943 as the first female instructor in
the physics department, although she left
Lily Yu:
for Columbia and the Manhattan Project the
next year. What I wrote is a compressed, surrealist
Lily Yu:
interpretation of her life up until the 1953 experiment.
Chris Herzog:
People are often turned off, I think, from
physics and math because they think it’s
Chris Herzog:
too hard. One thing that’s kept me going
is the idea that if it were really that hard,
Chris Herzog:
then no one would understand it. The fault was
somehow in a poor explanation. Science plays,
Chris Herzog:
I think, are a way of getting around this
problem. By definition, they excite and engage
Chris Herzog:
the audience, and ultimately, if they reach
some higher artistic level, they convey some
Chris Herzog:
deeper truth.
[music]
