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Physics and The Arts :-)



From the pages of Harper's Magazine, March 1999:

"From proposals for plays submitted to New York City's Ensemble Studio
Theater for its EST/Sloan Foundation Science & Technology Project, which
was established 'to foster new dramatic works related to scientific and
technological issues.'"
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Title: "Ig and Ed"
Author: Brian Kaufman

"'Ig and Ed' is a nuclear 'My Dinner with Andre' in which physicists
Igor Kurchatov and Edward Teller, the two men most responsible for
developing nuclear weapons in Russia and the United States, grapple with
scientific responsibility and the nature of patriotism in the nuclear
age."
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Title: "Schroedinger's Girlfriend"
Author: Matthew Wells

"Einstein meets 'The Blue Angel' in this Ortonesque romantic comedy in
which love obeys the crazy laws of subatomic physics.

"Behind every great man is a woman, and behind physicist Erwin
Schroedinger is the maddenly elusive Ute Haas, a cabaret singer and
physics groupie who describes herself as 'a woman with two bedrooms.'
Ute's had flings with them all, and now she's doting on Schroedinger.

"As the besotted Schroedinger grapples with the logical absurdities
that govern subatomic (and female) behavior, he finds himself falling in
love with a woman who is the embodiment of Heisenberg's uncertainty
principle. Their relationship develops into a passionate affair in which
they attract and repel each other like two particles in an acceleration
chamber.

"It is this passion that gives Schroedinger real-world examples of
wave/particle duality, the paradox of non-locality, and the solipsism of
observer-created reality. He begins to believe that Ute is his own
creation -- that she has no life of her own outside his attentions. Ute
naturally objects, and the affair ends in an explosion of possessive
jealousy when Ute leaves Schroedinger for another physicist.

"Enraged, Schroedinger devises a twisted revenge: he plants a vial of
cyanide in Ute's apartment, placing it so that the vial will shatter if
she opens the door to the bedroom she uses for sex. But as he waits
outside her apartment, Schroedinger realizes that a truth of love --
i.e., as long as you don't ask the question, the answer can always be yes --
is also a truth of quantum physics."

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from Larry Cartwright
Physics, Physical Science, Internet Teacher
Charlotte High School, 378 State Street, Charlotte MI 48813
<physics@scnc.cps.k12.mi.us> or <science@scnc.cps.k12.mi.us>

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