Science, an intellectual field that is not generally available to the general public, serves as an inexhaustible source for drama productions. Galileo Galilei - now the opera
Richard Pank
The premiere of the opera "Galileo Galilei". Galilean relativity on a gondola
Impressive box office successes in recent years have been based on stories specifically related to science. The biography of the Nobel laureate mathematician won the Oscar for best film ("Wonders of Reason"); The book on which the film was based was also a bestseller. Two plays - one about a young mathematician's struggle for recognition ("Proof") and the other about a fateful conversation between two scientists during World War II ("Copenhagen") - won Tony Awards and were performed for a long time on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. A monologue based on lectures by the physicist Richard Feynman was presented at the Lincoln Center in New York for many months.
Now the world of opera has joined in "Galileo Galilei", a new interpretation of human life that some consider him the father of modern science. The opera was staged at the "Next Wave" festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
The result is impressive. In the sixth act, for example, the setting of a 16th-century lecture hall was installed. At the front of the stage, Galileo addresses the audience, while several students tie ropes of different lengths to the geometric shapes he describes and roll balls to prove the physical principle he explains - the movement of balls on an inclined surface. The music increases, the balls roll and the ropes dangle. Composer Philip Glass calls it "a kind of playfulness, fun".
When Mary Zimmerman was approached and offered to participate in writing an opera about science, she immediately replied that this was not possible. Zimmerman, who wrote the libretto with Glass and Arnold Weinstein, is the director.
Dramatic possibilities are indeed inherent in the scientific process, but it raises difficulties for the writers. First they must understand the science behind the story. You don't have to be a cop to put together a believable police procedural story, but if you talk to enough cops, and hang around holding cells, you can imbue your story with enough realism. In this respect, science is no different from any other subject: a little research can work wonders. In the play "Proof" the identity of the author of a mathematical formula plays an important role in the plot as well as the fact that mathematicians often reach their peak before their age. 25 But these details are only the background for conflicts of a more traditional kind, between a daughter and her father, between a young woman and a returnee. Mathematics remains behind the scenes until the last moments of the play.
But science is not like police work. A little research is not enough to understand it. Science indeed deserves the reputation of difficulty it has earned. Try to answer the following question: If you drop a stone from the top of a mast in a sailing ship, where will the stone fall, at the feet of the mast or a little further away? The intuitive answer is a little further from there. The modern answer - at the feet of the mast, is an answer that a person can stand for himself when he observes the ship from a nearby dock. The fifth act in "Galileo Galileo" provides such a perspective, when three characters from a theoretical treatise written by Galileo come to life, pass before our eyes on a gondola and argue about what future generations will know as "Galilean relativity". From this point of view the modern answer seems perfectly logical.
And yet why science? Because, as in the best stories, the inevitable end is perceived as such only in hindsight. And how do you demonstrate this to the audience? "In simple words", as Heisenberg says in the first act of "Copenhagen". He simply repeats wise words he heard from Niels Bohr, his interlocutor. The task of Michael Frain who wrote "Copenhagen" was made easy thanks to the main character he wrote about, who in real life always insisted on clarity. As the fictitious Bohr says in the play: "We do not do science for ourselves, but so that we can explain it to others." Adopting Bohr's model, Frein presents not only Heisenberg's and Bohr's science—uncertainty and completion, the two pillars of quantum mechanics—but also their path to what they got: their long walks, days-long conversations, explanations, and Heisenberg's impulsive assumptions versus balanced counter-assumptions and the contemplation of Bohr.
In their movie "Wonders of Reason", screenwriter Akiva Goldsman and director Ron Howard needed to find a visual counterpart to the mathematical principles of John Nash. goddess
were found in the diet patterns of pigeons and courtship and pairing patterns of college students. The cinematic climax - the mixing of the audience in Nash's point of view - is reserved for his madness and not for his mathematics.
"Galileo Galilei" reverses this traditional emphasis. Even in the opera, as in the play "Copenhagen", even if science does not occupy the first place by itself - it stands alongside other subjects. The usual confrontations and conflicts that always arise in the description of Galileo's life were not neglected: the opera depicts him standing before the Inquisition, both when he defends his belief that the earth revolves around the sun and when he retracts it. But the opera describes how he came to this belief and why he finds it so difficult to give it up, even in the face of the risk that he will spend the rest of his life under house arrest.
Einstein once said: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." He was talking about physics, but his words also apply to art that deals with the scientific process: simple language but not too simple.
A general lesson also emerges from the new opera, relevant to every creative mind: few are the scientists, but everyone is a critic.
