As she designed a seminar on physics and theater, Rosa Alejandra Lukaszew had something more concrete in mind than bridging the familiar cultural chasm between the arts and the sciences. She wanted to connect students on her campus.
The associate professor of physics at the College of William and Mary had noted that black-clad thespians and calculator-toting physics majors occupied different orbits. Each camp viewed the other with suspicion and disdain. “I thought a class like this might merge the two types of students and let them find out what they have in common,” she says.
Ms. Lukaszew’s “Physics and Theatre” seminar, offered last fall to 15 freshmen, attempted to integrate those two viewpoints through discussions of the role of physics in the theater, and dramatic presentations of scientific figures and concepts.
In class the students read several plays about science and scientists and pondered how scientific principles and discoveries influence society and are represented in art. Students not only analyzed the structure, plot, and character development in plays like Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo and Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, but also learned about Galileo’s clash with the Roman Catholic Church and about the science behind the atomic bomb.
The course covered the technical applications of physics in the theater as well. Students learned about the development of special effects like the use of black-light projections at Prague’s Laterna Magika Theater, and investigated the optic and electromagnetic properties that make them possible.
The professor says the seminar exposed students to modern theories not usually covered in introductory physics classes, such as quantum mechanics and chaos theory. While studying Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, the class contemplated the difference between Newtonian and nonlinear physics. The discussion of Peter Parnell’s QED focused as much on the life of the Nobel Prize-winning quantum physicist Richard Feynman as on his theories of the wave-particle duality of subatomic matter.
Students on both sides of the art-science divide benefited, says Ms. Lukaszew. Arts majors came to see scientists as “emotional creatures,” while the scientifically inclined learned about the individuals behind the formulas and theories they use in their more-conventional physics courses.
The two groups, she says, found more common ground than they had anticipated, and discovered that physics “wasn’t such a difficult language to learn from both sides.”
Assignments:
Students wrote six papers, four of them on the plays they studied in class and two on the scientific concepts present in the plays. They attended a campus production of the musical It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Superman and analyzed the play’s dramatic structure and use of effects. During classroom debates on contemporary scientific controversies, students were asked to argue persuasively for or against stem-cell research and the development of weapons of mass destruction.
Students say:
For Sarah K. Rozycki, who had stage-managed several high-school theater productions and entered William and Mary planning to major in physics, the seminar fused her two primary interests. “It was a cool, interesting combination that should be explored more often,” she says.
Ms. Rozycki delivered two class presentations during the semester, one on nuclear fission and another on Galileo’s pendulum. Her favorite part was the class tour of a campus theater with a stage technician, who showed them how light and sound can accentuate action on stage and described how lighting effects, which started with waving a piece of paper in front of a light bulb, have evolved to modern strobe lights.
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http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 54, Issue 34, Page A11