Science on Stage

Science on Stage

Author: Kirsten Shepherd-Barr

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2018-06-05

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 0691188238

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Science on Stage is the first full-length study of the phenomenon of "science plays"--theatrical events that weave scientific content into the plot lines of the drama. The book investigates the tradition of science on the stage from the Renaissance to the present, focusing in particular on the current wave of science playwriting. Drawing on extensive interviews with playwrights and directors, Kirsten Shepherd-Barr discusses such works as Michael Frayn's Copenhagen and Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. She asks questions such as, What accounts for the surge of interest in putting science on the stage? What areas of science seem most popular with playwrights, and why? How has the tradition evolved throughout the centuries? What currents are defining it now? And what are some of the debates and controversies surrounding the use of science on stage? Organized by scientific themes, the book examines selected contemporary plays that represent a merging of theatrical form and scientific content--plays in which the science is literally enacted through the structure and performance of the play. Beginning with a discussion of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, the book traces the history of how scientific ideas (quantum mechanics and fractals, for example) are dealt with in theatrical presentations. It discusses the relationship of science to society, the role of science in our lives, the complicated ethical considerations of science, and the accuracy of the portrayal of science in the dramatic context. The final chapter looks at some of the most recent and exciting developments in science playwriting that are taking the genre in innovative directions and challenging the audience's expectations of a science play. The book includes a comprehensive annotated list of four centuries of science plays, which will be useful for teachers, students, and general readers alike.


Weird Scientists – the Creators of Quantum Physics

Weird Scientists – the Creators of Quantum Physics

Author: Jeffrey Strickland

Publisher: Lulu.com

Published: 2011-09-04

Total Pages: 570

ISBN-13: 1257976249

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Weird Scientists is a sequel to Men of Manhattan. As I wrote the latter about the nuclear physicists who brought in the era of nuclear power, quantum mechanics (or quantum physics) was unavoidable. Many of the contributors to the science of splitting the atom were also contributors to quantum mechanics. Atomic physics, particle physics, quantum physics, and even relativity are all interrelated. This book is about the men and women who established the science that shook the foundations of classical physics, removed determinism from measurement, and created alternative worlds of reality. The book introduces fundamental concepts of quantum mechanics, roughly in the order they were discovered, as a launching point for describing the scientist and the work that brought forth the concepts.


Higgs Force

Higgs Force

Author: Nicholas Mee

Publisher: Quantum Wave Publishing

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 439

ISBN-13: 0957274610

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"Higgs Force tells the incredible story of the most important scientific discovery of the past 50 years. It begins with the ideas of the Greek philosophers over two thousand years ago, and takes us on a journey through many of the most important scientific discoveries in history before bringing us right up to date with the discovery of the Higgs particle in July 2012"--Page 4 of cover.


Renaissance Drama 35

Renaissance Drama 35

Author: Mary Floyd-Wilson

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2006-06-22

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 0810123657

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Renaissance Drama, an annual and interdisciplinary publication, is devoted to drama and performance as a central feature of Renaissance culture. The essays in each volume explore traditional canons of drama, the significance of performance (broadly construed) to early modern culture, and the impact of new forms of interpretation on the study of Renaissance plays, theatre, and performance. This special issue of Renaissance Drama "Embodiment and Environment in Early Modern Drama and Performance" is guest-edited by Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. Anatomized, fragmented, and embarrassed, the body has long been fruitful ground for scholars of early modern literature and culture. The contributors suggest, however, that period conceptions of embodiment cannot be understood without attending to transactional relations between body and environment. The volume explores the environmentally situated nature of early modern psychology and physiology, both as depicted in dramatic texts and as a condition of theatrical performance. Individual essays shed new light on the ways that travel and climatic conditions were understood to shape and reshape class status, gender, ethnicity, national identity, and subjectivity; they focus on theatrical ecologies, identifying the playhouse as a "special environment" or its own "ecosystem," where performances have material, formative effects on the bodies of actors and audience members; and they consider transactions between theatrical, political, and cosmological environments. For the contributors to this volume, the early modern body is examined primarily through its engagements with and operations in specific environments that it both shapes and is shaped by. Embodiment, these essays show, is without borders.


Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare's England

Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare's England

Author: Kristen Poole

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2011-06-30

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 1139497650

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Bringing together recent scholarship on religion and the spatial imagination, Kristen Poole examines how changing religious beliefs and transforming conceptions of space were mutually informative in the decades around 1600. Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare's England explores a series of cultural spaces that focused attention on interactions between the human and the demonic or divine: the deathbed, purgatory, demonic contracts and their spatial surround, Reformation cosmologies and a landscape newly subject to cartographic surveying. It examines the seemingly incongruous coexistence of traditional religious beliefs and new mathematical, geometrical ways of perceiving the environment. Arguing that the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century stage dramatized the phenomenological tension that resulted from this uneasy confluence, this groundbreaking study considers the complex nature of supernatural environments in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare's Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth and The Tempest.


The Open World MANIFESTO

The Open World MANIFESTO

Author: V. Alexander STEFAN

Publisher: Stefan University Press

Published: 2009-12-21

Total Pages: 1058

ISBN-13:

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V. Alexander STEFAN The Open World MANIFESTO Novus Ordo Scientifico-Technologicus. QUALB Coeptis New Order Scientific-Technological. QUALB Cooperates CONTENTS BOOK 1 SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY: A New Earth and a New Atlantis Universe: Our Very Own 393 BOOK 2 HUMAN BEINGS; OUR ID-NUMBERS; OUR CONSCIOUSNESS of TIME 558 BOOK 3 FREEDOM, DEMOCRACY, and PLURALISM: The Dawning of the Terrestrial Civilization 618 BOOK 4 THE AGE OF EDUCATION: CREATIVE EDUCATION versus DRILL EDUCATION 699 BOOK 5 HUMAN BEING and QUALB the GIVER, the SUPREME BEING: Science/Technology and Religion 754


Connecting Literature and Science

Connecting Literature and Science

Author: Jay A. Labinger

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-11-18

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1000472922

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This book presents a case for engagement between the sciences and the humanities. The author, a professional chemist, seeks to demonstrate that the connections between those fields of intellectual activity are far more significant than anything that separates them. The book combines a historical survey of the relationships between science and literature with a number of case studies that examine specific scientific episodes—several drawn from the author’s own research—juxtaposed with a variety of literary works spanning a wide range of period and genre—Dante to detective fiction, War and Peace to White Teeth—to elicit their common themes. The work argues for an empirical, non-theory-based approach, one that is closely analogous to connectionist models of brain development and function, and that can appeal to general readers, as well as to literary scholars and practicing scientists, who are open to the idea that literature and science should not be compartmentalized.


Springs of Scientific Creativity

Springs of Scientific Creativity

Author: Rutherford Aris

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 1983

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 1452907951

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Mathematician Henri Poincaré was boarding a bus when he realized that the transformations of non-Euclidean geometry were just those he needed in his research on the theory of functions. He did not have to interrupt his conversation, still less to verify the equation in detail; his insight was complete at that point. Poincaré's insight into his own creativity -- his awareness that preliminary cogitation and the working of the subconscious had prepared his mind for an intuitive flash of recognition -- is just one of many possible analyses of scientific creativity, a subject as fascinating as it is elusive. The authors of this book have chosen to search for the springs of scientific creativity by examining the lives and work of a dozen innovative thinkers in the fields of mathematics, physics, and chemistry from the seventeenth down to the mid-twentieth century.