Science Rebels Come to Life: Three Plays with Color Images from Stage Productions (English Edition)

Three full-length play scripts - with color illustrations from stage productions - bring to life the stories of major discoveries in science - the Expanding Universe, the Big Bang, the Quantum Revolution, the Quantum Wonderland, all through legendary battles between the maverick characters - Einstein, Hubble, Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schroedinger and many others. The stories are embedded in the tumultuous lives and loves in times of war and political upheavals. The three plays are titled: CREATION'S BIRTHDAY - A BIG BANG BEGINNING, QUANTUM LOVERS, and QUANTUM WONDERLAND.

CREATION’S BIRTHDAY - A BIG BANG BEGINNING brings to life the story of the Big-Bang Genesis through the legendary battle between astronomer Edwin Hubble and the scientific icon Albert Einstein. How did Hubble, a boxing champ, war-hero, Rhodes scholar, and upstart, want-to-be astronomer gang up with a janitor to discover our expanding universe? How did Hubble ally with a Jesuit priest to use the expanding universe to expose the greatest blunder of the paramount scientist - Albert Einstein? How could the infallible, scientific genius of the century so bungle his theory as to completely miss the creation of the universe? Several reviews of the play's performance are included.

QUANTUM LOVERS is about how Einstein and Mileva’s quest for true love entangle with their pursuit of the nature of the quantum. Einstein, the budding science prodigy falls passionately in love with Mileva, the feminist mathematician, torn between career and love to become his first wife. Among his revolutionary discoveries about the relativity of space and time, Einstein reveals the quantum nature of light. The quantum becomes mysterious, full of contradictions, but with fascinating features. Like the quantum, their love is magical, yet grows full of contradictions. Mileva fights for their failing love and science partnership. They get hopelessly caught by the turmoil of the Great War, triggered by the disease of nationalism, which engulfs their colleagues, Planck and Haber. Planck is the reluctant revolutionary who launches the quantum era, yet resists its far-reaching consequences. Haber becomes the incarnation of Jekyll and Hyde with his inventions of fertilizer to eliminate world hunger, and of poison gas to win the war for Germany. Einstein condemns nationalism’s catastrophic ideology to warn of the exploding dangers that eventually lead to the inferno of the first World War. While the inferno around them decimates the continent, Einstein quietly launches a second revolution to overturn the universe with a mind-bending explanation of gravity, surpassing Newton. Will he finally win the Nobel prize that eludes him despite his vast successes? Can Einstein and Mileva ever grasp the true nature of the quantum? Can Einstein and Mileva embrace the nature of true love?

QUANTUM WONDERLAND is about the maddeningly bizarre quantum world where quantum entities in one place appear instantly in another place; or penetrate solid walls; or a cat is dead and alive at the same time! The main characters – Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg and Schroedinger - who discover this fascinating new world constantly spar with each other about the beguiling features they reveal. A multiplicity of truths contradict our immediate commonsense experiences. The quantum puts a limit on what can be precisely known. Effect ceases to follow cause. Uncertainty demolishes the deterministic world. Entangled quantum particles instantly interact with each other, even when they are galaxies apart. In the period between the two World Wars, the cultural anxieties of 1920’s Germany becomes the fertile milieu for the birth of the quantum. The pleasure in exploring the quantum wonderland is the delight of a magic show through the performance of its pioneers. Nature is a far stranger place that anyone thought.