Put a Little Science in Your Life

This Sunday's New York Times has a really special op-ed piece from Brian Greene, string theorist and author of many popular non-fiction bookson scientific topics.

Greene writes about Science's mis-characterization in the public sphere as a method/world-view that is useful (produces technology) but ultimately difficult to grasp, boring, or unable to inspire real wonder or 'spiritual' satisfaction. He writes about faults in the ways science is often taught: "Like a music curriculum that requires its students to practice scales while rarely if ever inspiring them by playing the great masterpieces."

Here's my favorite bit:

"It’s one thing to go outside on a crisp, clear night and marvel at a sky full of stars. It’s another to marvel not only at the spectacle but to recognize that those stars are the result of exceedingly ordered conditions 13.7 billion years ago at the moment of the Big Bang. It’s another still to understand how those stars act as nuclear furnaces that supply the universe with carbon, oxygen and nitrogen, the raw material of life as we know it.

And it’s yet another level of experience to realize that those stars account for less than 4 percent of what’s out there — the rest being of an unknown composition, so-called dark matter and energy, which researchers are now vigorously trying to divine."

Beautiful.

Anyway, I just really liked all this. But, it also relates to our endeavor at 1st Stage. One play I'd very much like to do in our first season is a charming, fascinating, and odd work by Charlotte Jones, called Humble Boy. Humble Boy's main character, Felix Humble, is a troubled string theorist. Jones, aside from writing a touching story on the human level, manages to expound on the intricacies of String Theory through a number of Felix's cryptic, fascinating, and vaguely metaphorical monologues.

It, like Brian Greene's writing, is useful for provoking curiosity and yielding greater understanding in scientific realms, but most importantly it's also just a fun, entertaining experience; it's exactly what science themed works can and should be.