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!
Page 1: Cast List
This page: Copernicus meets Galileo in
Katy's bed room.
Page3: The Quark
Girls
| With a noise from the wardrobe, Galileo & Copernicus emerge, G carrying his telescope. | |
| Copernicus : | (To audience) In comes I, Copernicus, an astronomer from long ago who studied the stars & planets. With my clever observations I showed why Aristotle was wrong! Do you think that the sun goes around the earth? & all the other planets too? (response) Of course not! |
| Galileo : | (To audience) In comes I, Galileo, an Italian astronomer! With my telescope & my experiments a hundred years later I was able to show that Copernicus was right! Do you know what a telescope does? (response) |
| Copernicus : | Well met my friend! |
| Galileo nods to him & starts setting up his telescope, pointing out of the window - towards the audience. | |
| Copernicus : | Young lady, what is your name? |
| Katy : | Katy. |
| Copernicus : | You are asking very intelligent questions Katy, although I'm not sure that we can answer them all. At your school, do you measure things & do sums? |
| Katy : | Ye-es... |
| Copernicus : | Inspired by the example of our learned friend (indicates A) I leant myself to the most careful measurement of how the planets, sun & moon travel across the sky. |
| Aristotle : | The truth can not be known through such games! You cannot measure the aether! The pure essence of every... |
| Katy : | Shut up you, & listen, you might learn something! |
| Copernicus : | (gestures to the sky )Watching the planets travel across the sky I was able to see that they do not move in circles around the earth. In fact sometimes they even seem to move backwards! This could only happen if the earth itself were moving, & I concluded that the Sun is at the centre & that the earth & the planets are circling around it! |
| Galileo : | Something which I was able to confirm in many ways with my telescope. For instance, look at this! A looks through the scope - lights come down & focus on the scope & the people gathered around it. |
| Aristotle : | What am I seeing? Mountains & valleys & oceans in some distant place? |
| Galileo : | That is the Moon! Not a perfect sphere of light as you imagined it, but a world not unlike our own, moving through space! |
| Copernicus & Katy take a look. | |
| Aristotle : | I cannot believe it! |
| Katy : | It's true! That's what I was trying to tell you! You probably think that the stars are little lights in the sky, but they are suns too! They all look at her in amazement. |
| Galileo : | Dear Aristotle, don't be upset, we would never have had the idea if brilliant men like you in the past hadn't done the ground work. Look at this! Points the telescope somewhere else. Aristotle takes a look. |
| Aristotle : | I see a great light with some tiny ones like stars arranged in a line next to it |
| Galileo : | The great light is the planet Jupiter, the smaller ones are its moons. They are travelling around it! |
| Copernicus : | Amazing! Let me see! |
| Katy : | Me too! |
| Copernicus : | This is wonderful! It's so beautiful! I don't know what to say! I think I'm going to cry... |
| Katy : | Yuk! Anyway it's not that exciting! |
| Galileo : | Not exciting? To you perhaps but imagine how I felt - I was the first person ever to see these things, ever! |
| Copernicus : | (To Galileo) But I fear that you may have had to pay a terrible price for this vision. |
| Galileo : | It was the Church, in its wisdom, which taught me. I founded my science on their lessons , but yes, they made me pay the price .... silence, prison & the burning of my books. |
| Katy : | They burned your books? But why? |
| With a crash the Inquisition, accompanied by soldiers armed with pikes, emerge from the wardrobe. |