Physics Buzz

TONY CENICOLA/NEW YORK TIMES Three of Tom Stoppard's plays reveal a deep fascination with physics. When it comes to writing about science, playwright Tom Stoppard is in a genre all his own. Stoppard, whom you might know as the screenwriter for the movies Shakespeare in Love and Brazil , wrote three plays he called his "physics plays": Arcadia (1993), in which a group of modern academics try to piece together the life of a young girl in the early 19th century; Hapgood (1988), about the fictional head of a top British intelligence agency during the Cold War; and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966), in which Stoppard reimagines Shakespeare's Hamlet from the perspective of its two least important characters. But the plays aren't science fiction or physics edutainment, nor do they portray events from the history of science or depend on science to drive the plot. Instead, Stoppard masterfully uses concepts from physics to ask deep existential questions