A play for secondary students to perform for a primary school audience about the history of Science. Barry Patterson 1999. The play was performed by the students of Kenilworth School. Thanks to them and to their teachers, they were great!
This page: Cast List.
Page 2: Copernicus
& Galileo
Page3: The Quark Girls
Cast List
Mum - Katy's Mum.
Katy - A girl with a questioning mind.
Dad - Katy's Dad
Jane - Katy's sister.
Aristotle - 384-322 B.C.E. A famous ancient Greek philosopher. His writings include a book called Physics which includes a lot about astronomy & nature. He made a huge contribution to later science, culture & theology but his work was mostly qualitative rather than quantitative.
Nicolaus Copernicus - 1473-1543. A Polish astronomer whose detailed observations of planetary movement led him to propose the theory that they were orbiting the Sun & that the Earth was not at the centre of the universe. He also described Earth's movements around the sun & its spinning on its axis.
Galileo Galilei - 1564-1642. The first astronomer to use a telescope to make observations of the sky. He discovered lunar mountains and valleys, sun spots, four moons of Jupiter and the phases of Venus. In physics, he discovered the laws of falling bodies and projectiles. His work was condemned by the Church authorities of the time. Eventually he was sentenced to a lifetime house arrest. In 1992 the Pope reversed his condemnation & the Vatican acknowledged its error.
The Inquisition - The thought police of the Vatican from medieval times to the 19th Century. In defending their faith they arrested & persecuted people with heretical beliefs.
Archbishop James Ussher - 1581-1656. An Anglican bishop from Ireland famous for stating in his Annales Veteris et Novi Testamente of 1654 that Heaven & Earth were created on Sunday 21st October, 4004 B.C. at 9.00am. The time of day seems to vary in different accounts of his life, this is the best sourced one that I could find.
Roger Bacon - 1214-1294. Bacon was a Franciscan monk who believed that mathematics & experimentation were the only way of really understanding the world. He spent ten years in prison for writing his books on this subject yet he also believed in alchemy & astrology. He was the first person in Europe to make gunpowder which had earlier been discovered by the Chinese.
Annie Jump Cannon - 1863-1941. Cannon was an astronomer based at Harvard College Observatory in the U.S.A. Using astronomical photographs she discovered many new objects & she made a catalogue of 250,000 stellar spectra. She was the first woman to receive an Honorary Doctorate from Oxford University & some of her work is still accepted as the international standard.
Sir Isaac Newton - 1643-1727. The Father of modern science! An apple didn't really fall onto his head but he did discover the laws of motion & gravitation. He also studied light & optics & was the co- inventor, with Leibnitz (they argued over it) of Differential Calculus. His natural philosophy treated nature as if it were a machine & speculated about atoms but he also studied & wrote extensively about alchemy, mysticism & theology.
Albert Einstein - 1879-1955. Einstein was a slow developer whose professors didn't think very highly of him. He left school at 15 because he didn't like it & got a job as a clerk. He is famous for his work on atomic & nuclear physics as well as his theories of relativity showing that measurements changed according to the movement of the person making them - which challenged Newton's mechanistic model of the Universe.
Erwin Schrödinger - 1887-1961. Schrödinger won the 1933 Nobel Prize in physics. He devised mathematical descriptions of atomic structure & quantum mechanics. Unlike Einstein who was uncomfortable with the breakthroughs to which he himself had contributed, Schrödinger was a leading advocate of the revolutionary new ideas about the nature of matter & energy which emerged in the early part of the 20th century.
Cat - "Schrödinger's Cat" is a famous paradox illustrating the inaccessibility of the quantum world to ordinary human reason. I portray Schrödinger as attempting to carry out the experiment on Katy's cat Tigger, but in real life he never did it.
Stephen Hawking 1942- Despite being paralysed by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, an incurable disease of the nervous system, confined to a motorised wheelchair & unable to speak, Hawking has become one of the world's leading theoretical physicists & is a familiar & widely respected ambassador for late 20th century science to the world at large. He is primarily concerned with cosmology & the unification of different areas of physics theory to provide a "Grand Unified Theory" or "Theory of Everything" about which Einstein originally speculated.
The Quark Girls. Quarks are the tiny particles out of which the familiar atomic particles of the nucleus such as protons & neutrons are made. They can only be described in very abstract ways so their unusual properties have been described by terms such as strangeness & charm or red, blue & green although these words do not really give us any idea of what they are really like.