Monday, March 04, 2002

NEXT UP, THE RICHARD FEYNMAN BOOGIE NIGHTS SEQUEL: Missy Schwartz hips us all to the existence of a play starring (actors playing) Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. She says it's not just for geeks, but I'm sure being a geek will only deepen the experience. She adds:

Two overarching themes are uncertainty and complementarity. Heisenberg's famous uncertainty principle states that it is impossible to have full information about the location and momentum of a particle, that the act of observing it changes its momentum. Bohr's complementarity principle says that the behavior of an electron can be understood completely only by descriptions in both wave an particle form, that these seemingly paradoxical interpretations are necessary to understand a system. In an observed world, we can only talk about the probability of a given outcome. Moreover, I can make one observation about the universe from one moment in my own space-time, but someone else in the universe could do the same, from their own perspective, and observe something different.

This sounds like science fiction of a very literal sort, where scientific ideas are metaphors for human problems and not objective phenomenon the way they are in straight-up science fiction. Cool, it's coming to Philly in April.

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