Perfectly lovely story this morning on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. If you want to try and understand why I'm so enthusiastic about this play and this playwrite then listen to the story I've embedded below. It's an impressively thorough story ... for broadcast ... and bothers to pull out some of my favorite quotes:
A great poet is always timely. A great philosopher is an urgent need. There's no rush for Isaac Newton. We were quite happy with Aristotle's cosmos; 55 crystal spheres geared to God's crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I can't think of anything more trivial than the speed of light. Quarks, quasars, big bang, black hole – who gives a sh—?
And this one...
To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing! People were talking about the end of physics; relativity and quantum [physics] looked as if they were going to clean out the whole problem between them. A theory of everything! But they only explain the very big and the very small; the universe, the elementary particles. The ordinary side stuff, which is our lives — the things people write poetry about — clouds, daffodils, waterfalls, and what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in. These things are full of mystery.
