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From Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faust (1604) to Oxygen (2000) by Carl Djerassi and Roald Hoffmann, there is a long tradition of dramatic work related to science and scientist. More recently, the enormously successful Copenhagen (1998) by Michael Frayn's and a wave of new plays about scientific themes such as Arcadia, Wit, After Darwin and others have created new dramatic phenomenon. These works are not the conventional documentary-dramas about scientific discovery but engaging plays. A recent book entitled Science on Stage (1) reviews more than a hundred plays presenting scientific themes on stage. Beginning in 2005, a play was developed with the objective of conveying the concepts and history of crystallography to large audiences in a dramatic setting. The script centers on the mural drawn by Picasso in 1950 at the flat of the iconic crystallographer J.D. Bernal, during his historical meeting with the world-famous artist. The main characters discuss the concepts of crystallography and explore the interconnections between Science and Art. The script has had several readings in academic settings (University of Illinois at Chicago, 2007; Barcelona, Zaragoza, Spain, 2008). The première staged reading of the play was produced at Argonne National Laboratory on May 4th2008. Details can be found at http://www.aps.anl.gov/Users/Meeting/2008/Picasso/index.php. The project has developed from an initial script entitled `Picasso Meets Crystallography' emphasizing the concepts and history of crystallography to the more dramatically-rich version entitled `Bernal's Picasso', which explores the relationships between Science and Art and is intended for wider theater audiences. The presentation will discus the history of the project with vignettes of previous performances, its multiple facets and its future development as a novel way to convey crystallography to wider audiences, and to explore in a dramatic context the role of crystallography in today's society
abstracts
The magnificent rose windows of the Gothic cathedrals have been the object of wonder and fascination to architects, artists and human beings alike, since they were used to emphasize the splendor of Gothic architecture, its lightness of forms and luminosity of interiors. There is considerable amount of literature on the theme including studies on the stone tracery and the stained glass, and a website created by a prominent author in the field (www.therosewindow.com, [1]) is an excellent resource. A brief reference in the classic book Symmetry by H. Weyl [2] suggested that rose windows were indeed excellent examples of planar point group symmetry. However, a rigorous and systematic study of this particular facet of these masterpieces has never been done. Preliminary results of the frequency of different symmetrical arrangements for more than five hundred windows have been recently published [3] and will be presented. In addition, detailed analysis of certain examples of rose windows and iconic macromolecular structures suggest that various symmetrical figures and entities that are part of our world can have symbolic meaning. They can be described by the rigorous framework of group theory in mathematics but they have also been used through history to convey different thoughts, insights and perceptions of the artists (and scientists) as designers and executors of the cosmological view of the times. A project aimed at extending these studies in the future will be presented.
