Mar 15th, 2004, 10:15 AM
GOD'S DICE by Max Burbank
GOD’S DICE (Working draft)
By Max Burbank
(It’s dark. We can hear a pencil scratching. Chamber music comes up, violin and piano. Now we see the outlines of a man at a desk. There are stacks of books in disarray, notebooks, a Styrofoam cup of coffee, a laptop. Maybe the glow from it is all that illuminates him. Files, folders, the detritus of lengthy, protracted work. He pauses, scrubs his face, and continues. He could be finishing a long overdue manuscript or a suicide note, whatever it is; it’s of enormous personal importance. Lights behind him reveal a silhouette. Music fades into and wind, feet, horses.)
PLUTARCH
Caesar advanced with only three hundred horse and five thousand foot; the rest of his forces were far behind, but he would not wait, choosing rather to put his adversaries in confusion by a sudden and unexpected attack. When he came to the river Rubicon, which was the boundary of his province, he stood silent a long time, weighing with himself the greatness of his enterprise. At last, like one who plunges down from the top of a precipice into a gulf of immense depth, he silenced reason, shut his eyes against danger, crying out "The die is cast," he forded the river, which The Emperor Pompey had forbidden. So came civil war to Rome. What could be a stronger proof of the blindness and infatuation of human nature, when carried away by its passions?
(Words fade up on screen, "Lacta Alea EST" , The Die Is Cast, hold for a moment and fade, as does Plutarch’s light. Light is also rising on David at desk. He looks up, sees us, smiles slightly.)
DAVID
Sophocles credits a Greek, Palamedes, with the invention of Dice. Something to pass the time during the siege of troy. Herodotus said it was the Lydians, but archeologists have found dice in Egyptian tombs, made from the heelbones of sheep. Plato blamed God for their invention, while Einstein famously insisted "God Does not Play Dice!" so really, who do you believe?
(Sips at a Styrofoam coffee cup, grimaces.)
This coffee is cold. Its atoms are no longer moving as fast as they were… whenever the hell I bought it. Judging by the skin the cream has formed near the edges of the cup, I’m going to say days. I’m sure there’s a way to determine exactly how long it takes a mixture of coffee and cream to cool sufficiently to form a skin like this… some function of cooling and stagnation, entropy. Entropic coffee tastes bad. Entropic? Entropized? I bought it because I was getting tired, but that was… Apparently I didn’t finish it. Second wind I guess. I was thinking about dice, and decisions, and Caesar… It’s Classic Newtonian physics; Caesar commits to crossing the Rubicon, Civil War begins. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction…
See, now, I have it, I have it, it’s already done, it’s just the math now, just the proof. I had it… well, before I bought this coffee. And I can finish the proof, although Math is not my strongest suit… What I’ve got here, I think it’s very… big, it’s a big, beautiful idea the size of… when I publish this, when this is published, everyone, everyone…
(second actor enters as Professor Epstein,but stays in the background, in the shadows)
EPSTEIN
So? I’m going to see this draft when, David?
DAVID
Soon, Professor Epstein, I’m almost there.
EPSTEIN
Is that soon soon as in next week or soon as in dedicated to me posthumously?
(Pause, David says nothing, shuffles papers, doesn’t look at Prof.)
Because seriously, some of your previous papers are very nice. Publishable. You could maybe rework one of those, go a little further on some aspect-
DAVID
No.
EPSTEIN
other papers are good solid work, this one… I don’t want you should get stuck on something maybe it’s a dead end.
DAVID
I’ll be done soon.
(Prof. Fades out)
What’s the progression? Galileo, Newton, Einstein; then who? Hawking? Would he say so? One of these new String Theory guys, these eleven dimension guys? Maybe, but could we even know? So who?
(picks up papers)
I’ve been thinking about this, gaming it around one way or another for years, just, you know, chewing at it, worrying it, and now here it all is, so I should tell someone, shouldn’t I? I’ve been up here, for, well, it was Wednesday when I bought the coffee, I should make a phone call, or, or… I mean, why am I standing here, why don’t I…
One of the earliest distinct memories I have, Kindergarten, I think, we were drawing, ‘draw an outdoor scene’ the teacher said. Each child drew a straight blue line for the sky and a yellow circle for the sun, straight yellow line segments radiating out around it. As if the other children all shared some symbolic language I’d never heard let alone learned. I took a blue crayon and turned it on it’s side and scraped at the paper with it; Then I took a yellow crayon and I bore down as hard as I could and ran it back and forth, hard, over and over about four square inches, then two square inches in the upper right hand corner… I remember the yellow wax building up and eventually the crayon snapped and I could feel with my fingers the wax was warm… And this little kid comes up behind me and says
(Second actor has come up behind him as kid)
KID
That is not how the sky looks. That is not how the sun looks in the sky.
DAVID
And I said, I know that, I KNOW, but the sky isn’t a blue line and you CAN’T SEE the sun, you can’t really SEE it, it’s too BRIGHT, you can’t LOOK at it, you CAN’T SEE IT’S SHAPE!
(Kid fades back)
I was… unimaginably popular. I did have a friend, later in school, one single good friend and during New England winters we’d play game after game of Monopoly and Backgammon and Risk, game after consecutive game
(Second actor is coming in to play Michael)
Until it was a single endless game
MICHAEL
I’m working on a theory of why everyone hates you.
DAVID
Everyone does not hate me.
MICHAEL
It’s because A.) You’re a Spaz, and secondly you’re irritating.
DAVID
Okay, you can’t say ‘A’ and then say ‘secondly’-
MICHAEL
See? Irritating. Like a rash.
DAVID
My mother says they pick on me because they’re jealous.
MICHAEL
Uh huh. And what do you think of her theory versus mine?
DAVID
Yours is simpler. But look, look, you’re smart, there are kids who’d push my face in just for saying ‘theory’ and you-
MICHAEL
Can use it in a sentence. But I also know when not to. And I can stop myself. Take today in Getchel’s class-
DAVID
Okay, okay, it should have just been in my head, I meant it to be just in my head-
MICHAEL
(Imitating the incident, holding an imaginary rock up to the light) ‘Mmm. Igneous rock, created by lava flowing over sand, fusing it into glass. These gray swirls could be carbonized organic matter!"
DAVID
Okay, look, it was awful, I know, I was just excited-
MICHAEL
And wrong. Don’t forget wrong.
DAVID
I wasn’t-
MICHAEL
Getchel said-
DAVID
That’s beside the point, it was a theory, I shouldn’t have said it out loud like a freak, I didn’t know I was going to, I just wanted to KNOW-
MICHAEL
See, now, that’s the thing.
DAVID
What is?
MICHAEL
You really do actually want to know. And the other kids smell that and then it’s all Lord of the Flies.
DAVID
But-
MICHAEL
Dave, I don’t even know how a TV works.
(Pause. David stares at him.)
DAVID
Okay, look. Take away the box and your TV is just a cathode ray tube. The cathode is a heated filament, like inside a light bulb. The ray is a stream of electrons that naturally pour off the filament-
MICHAEL
No, look, see, most people don’t care how it works, maybe they should but they don’t. I just want to watch it. I take it for granted like the lightswitch and the telephone. I mean, I’m not proud of that, I’m just saying. I don’t need to know how stuff works to use it. It doesn’t matter. I mean, who remembers the guy who invented TV?
DAVID
Filo Farnsworth.
MICHAEL
What? Shut up.
DAVID
Seriously. Filo T. Farnsworth.
(Lights are going down on Michael during his next line, he’s fading away.)
MICHAEL
Okay, first of all you are such a complete Jeopardy dork and B.) That kid had some seriously cruel parents. I mean, your last name is Farnsworth and you name your poor kid Filo? Come on.
DAVID
He was right. That’s almost a Newtonian law right there, if you figure something out, people will use it. You can’t blame Filo Farnsworth for ‘Fear Factor’ and you can’t applaud him for ’Masterpiece Theater’. All he did was figure out something beautiful, that a beam of electrons could move so fast; That a coil of copper wires could create a magnetic field and bend that beam so it landed on thousands of different points in an instant, that radio waves could be used to send an encoded signal that would instruct wires to bend electrons…
(During this next bit, our second actor has come up behind David as Janet, his classmate. She sits, opens a book and by the time she speaks they are having a conversation)
The Cathode Ray Tube is an elegant device and should not be held accountable for "The Flying Nun", "Battle of the Network Stars" various home shopping networks, five hundred some odd channels of unrelenting crap.
JANET
The first cathode ray tube scanning device was invented in 1897 by the German scientist Karl Ferdinand Braun-
DAVID
J.J. Thompson identified the particles moving in the Cathode Ray Tube as negatively charged pieces of atoms, electrons-
JANET
Which Plank theorized were absorbed as heat and emitted as light in discrete pieces, quanta, the behavior of which could be accurately predicted using a constant-
DAVID
But he didn’t believe his own theory, he hated his constant, he spent a decade trying to make the damn quanta go away, dissolve into the waves it was obvious all forms of energy were; See, now, that’s what I don’t understand, I mean, It’s Planks theory. Planck was the first person to see the revolutionary nature of Einstein’s work. Was he afraid of the implications?
JANET
Planck never left Germany.
DAVID
What? What does that have to do with-
JANET
He was too Prussian, too proud, maybe he never really believed the Nazis could come to power and then it was too late. He went to Hitler personally to plead for his Jewish friends. His Son Erwin was executed for taking part in the plot to assassinate Hitler-
DAVID
So, what are you saying, that Planck’s refusal to accept the directions in physics his own work implied was in some way like his refusal to accept what was becoming of Germany?
JANET
No! No. David. He’d already lost a son in World War One. Both his daughters died in childbirth. His home and library were destroyed, all his work, all his notes,
DAVID
Your talking History, Psychology, soft science, how could that have any bearing at all-
JANET
Don’t you think his life might have made him want to be sure, to be absolutely certain of his conclusions before trusting them? He said his resistance lead to ‘thorough enlightenment’, that his eventual acceptance was far more meaningful
DAVID
It was as a waste. If he’d embraced his results, if he joined Einstein-
JANET
Einstein loved him.
DAVID
So?
(Janet fades away)
I mean, yes, sure, very good, but, love, respect what does that matter? Can they be quantified? All I could see was the waste. All I could see was Plank turning away from his own work and it made me mad. But Einstein! Einstein walked right through the door Plank had opened, he flew through it-
(Music coming up very gradually, Phillip Glass "Floe")
By dreaming of light, imagining light, thinking of light, Chasing light; trying to catch it, reaching, but it stays just beyond his fingers, it’s speed unchanging, constant; By Dreaming of falling, imagining falling, thinking of falling, in elevators, off of roofs, falling into the happiest thought of his life, weightless and not falling but following the shape of space; space telling matter where to move, matter telling space how to curve, "A great work of art, The greatest feat of Human thinking about nature, the most amazing combination of philosophical penetration, physical intuition and mathematic skill!"
(Music fading)
Because of an irresistible longing, a need, to understand… to know.
(Janet is coming up behind him, but she’s not all the way in, she stays in shadow.)
JANET
But then he turned away to, just as Planck had.
DAVID
Because God does not play dice.
JANET
Turned away as if somehow the implications of his own work were simply too impossible-
DAVID
God, who he did not even believe in, not a God with hands in any case, not a God capable of or interested in human games-
JANET
Leaving it to Bohr to plow ahead at Copenhagen-
DAVID
Because God, God, GOD DOES NOT PLAY DICE, which is not a statement about the nature of the almighty but simply a flippant rejection of the implications of his own work-
JANET
Is it?
DAVID
A rejection of Copenhagen and quantum uncertainty, a rejection of the idea that something, anything, is beyond our ability to see-
JANET
Is that all he meant?
DAVID
Do you know, if you look for it in print, if you look for the phrase "God does not play dice", you can only find it attributed to him? You can’t find one single definite instance where he actually said it, the closest he comes is in a letter to Max Born, "I, at any rate, am convinced that He is not playing at Dice." And do you know what the bulk of that letter was about? A Play. A play Born’s wife had written. Because Einstein’s son-in-law was a well known theatrical critic.
JANET
(Backing out as she speaks, receding) So now the dream belonged to others, to Schroedinger and his distressing cat, to Niels Bohr, and Hesienberg, whom Bohr loved like a son…
DAVID
Heisenberg… Is that why Einstein tried to shut the door on Bohr and uncertainty? You can’t shut the door after the horses have gone, but if in some part of him he suspected where all this was going, where Heisenberg was going-
(Second actor is coming up behind David as Leo Szillard)
SZILLARD
Einstein, no one is going to pay any attention to this letter coming from me-
DAVID
I’m not him.
SZILLARD
You’ve read it, you understand it, you agree with me, these could be your words, they’ll listen to you-
DAVID
I’m not him, I won’t be him! (To audience) In July of 1939, this man, a physicist, a colleague, a Man Einstein once patented a refrigerator with, Leo Szilard visited Einstein in Long Island and described his calculations regarding a nuclear chain reaction in Uranium and graphite-
SZILARD
An atomic bomb, Einstein, it’s possible and if I have drawn that conclusion so has Heisenberg. He’s working on fission for the Nazis-
DAVID
He made clear what had been under Einstein’s nose all along, that if Energy equaled Mass times the Speed of Light Squared and man could find a way to release that energy-
SZILARD
They have annexed Chzekoslovakia, the Uranium mines there; They’ve stopped all exportation of Plutonium, which means they know. Imagine; imagine an atomic bomb in the hands of that monster-
DAVID
And supposedly, supposedly, Einstein said to Szillard "Daran habe ich gar nicht gedacht"!
(pause)
SZILARD
You never thought of it? How is that possible, Albert?
(Szilard is fading)
SZILARD AND DAVID
How is that possible?
DAVID
How could he not have known? My God, H.G. Wells knew in 1914! Nine years after Special relativity, Seven years after General relativity, a popular novelist writes "The World Set Free", a fine little potboiler in which civilization is laid waste by Nuclear War! Has there ever been a discovery large or small that Man has not attempted to turn into a weapon? And this beautiful idea; that energy and matter are the same, that vast, cosmic amounts of energy wait within everything to be released at the speed of light- How is it possible it never crossed his mind that people would try? Shouldn’t he have thought it through, wasn’t it his duty to think of the consequences, shouldn’t any scientist who calls himself a human being-
(David pauses, collects himself, shuffles a few of his papers)
No. He was… thinking of other things. Grand Unified field theory. His mind was elsewhere. It had nothing to do with fear or premonition. It’s understandable. I don’t think that as Newton held the apple he considered what his discoveries would mean to the science of trajectory. How as a direct result of his work, cannon balls, mortars and rockets would fall with deadly efficiency mixing buildings and dirt and people into lifeless mounds of rubble.
(Janet has come up behind him. Their relationship is different now, they’re older. She massages his shoulders)
JANET
You’re working too hard.
DAVID
Hmm? Oh. I was thinking I wasn’t working hard enough. It’s like a word on the tip of my tongue. I feel as if there’s a me that already knows but he hasn’t met me yet.
JANET
Maybe you and I could go away for a while.
DAVID
We’re perfectly situated when you think about it, aren’t we? For observation, I mean. If there were string tied on one end to the inside of an atom and on the other to the Universe, we’d be a gorgeous bead just about in the center, don’t you think? Tied midway between little and big.
JANET
Upsate maybe, in the mountains. I know a place.
DAVID
I’ve been trying to imagine what a star feels like when it collapses on itself, when the smaller it gets the deeper it tunnels into space.
JANET
David-
DAVID
Do you think an idea as big as a star could care about us? There has to be a moment, a fractional bit of now in a star's collapse, before it shrinks down to an infinitesimal point when it’s exactly our size.
(pause)
I’m almost done.
(Janet is fading. She’s just an outline now)
I just have to do a little more work and I’ll have it. It’s on the tip of my tongue. It’s here, in my head, in these papers. The happiest thought of my life. An idea the size of a star. Somewhere in the middle as if I could reach one hand out to touch the universe and put the other in the nucleus of an Atom. And for this moment, this fractional bit of now, this beautiful idea is mine alone.
Newton never imagined mortars. Einstein didn’t dream of bombs. But what about…
(he looks at his papers. It’s too much)
What about… the one of us… who’s next? They won’t be able to say "I never thought of it."
JANET
(Softly) He called relativity the Happiest thought of his life.
DAVID
An idea the size of a star, It’s a terrible thing to put something like that on earth. Ideas like that are too big, they can’t understand anything as fragile and tiny as people and love-
JANET
(Softly) When he heard of the explosion over Hiroshima, he is reported to have said "Oh, Horror."
DAVID
But can we live without ideas the size of stars? Can we live without imagining catching up with light? Without the happiest thoughts of our lives?
(He looks to Janet and as he does she fades out entirely)
Einstein said, "God does not play dice", but I think he was trying to listen to God. Not a God with hands or a God inclined to human games but a god who spoke out of a singularity and became a universe.
With all great respect, I believe that God does play dice.
And I think I know who God’s dice are.
(Lights fade and music as words fade up on screen, , "Lacta Alea EST" , The Die Is Cast. Lights to black. The screen and the laptop are all we see. Then those fade too.)
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but i finally printed it out and read it today. and first of all, your tone is awesome and b) great job on tackling such complicated subject matter.
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