Feel
Story line 1
Working with the resources we realized that white light is the synthesis of all colors of the rainbow. Newton discovered that about 1670. In general light was conceived to have geometrical properties.
About 1800 Sir Frederick William Herschel made an experiment that indicates the existence of invisible light (infrared light)
Next we found interesting that about 100 years later (1814) a German Physicist discovered that the spectrum of light wasn’t solid but has dark lines between certain colors. Unfortunately he couldn’t find an explanation about that.
In the late 1800’s the advances of the electromagnetic theory, introduces light as an electromagnetic wave, and a debate begins about light to be a particle or a wave.
In the school lab we set a spectrometer where we ionized gases and analyzed like Fraunhofer the light they produce isn’t a continuous spectrum but every gas has a specific spectral signature.
Story line 2
Galileo invents his telescope about 1609. For the first time we observe the sky.
The earth isn’t any more the center of the universe, not even in it’s solar system.
The telescopes are still optical devises
Harvard Observatory, early 1900’s
Edward Pickering hires a group of women scientists to catalogue photographic glass plates with the analyzed light spectrum (as Fraunhofer did) from thousand stars (b class scientific work). Annie Jump Canon was in charge of the group.
They called them Harvard Computers
Cecilia Payne a late member of the team, with a strong academic background describes in her thesis that the catalogue of the photographic plates, was a temperature catalogue of the stars.
Also the dark lines of their spectrum indicates the chemical signature of each star.
Payne’s thesis didn’t get approved from the Dean until there was men scientists to back her theory.
Telescopes using invisible light
Radio telescopes
Infrared telescope
Ultraviolet telescopes
X-Ray telescopes
Imagine
Our team chose the important facts to make a history of light in our own perspective.
The facts about invisible light wasn’t taken in to account because of time limitations.
•The twist
•To link the hole story was the idea of Cecilia Payne to be the narrator of the story to her granddaughter and to some of her friends, without telling them what was her role in it.
•Also we introduced a parallel scene where the story extends. So the narration of Payne transfers to the parallel scene from time to time where the scientists lived in the past.
Create
•After the completion of the script, we had to decide about the representations of the phenomena.
•We decided to represent the analysis of light with colored ribbons
•The team started the role distribution, the design of the set and the costumes.
•Rehearsals begin
Share
•The team creates the poster and invitations
•Facebook page and event
The Play
