richer story - where I play the title character, whom you've seen already.)Oxygen is about discovery in science: specifically, who should get the credit for discovering something - the first person to notice it (or generate it in the lab), the first person to publish his/her findings, or the person who first comes to the interpretation subsequently regarded as valid? In the case of the discovery of oxygen in the 1770s, three scientists can claim one or other of these distinctions. Lavoisier named the element, and, by disproving the dominant phlogiston theory, was the first to understand it, but he wasn't the first to synthesize it (a Swedish pharmacist named Scheele) or to publish the method of synthesis (the radical English clergyman Joseph Priestley). Both of the latter believed in the phlogiston theory. Indeed Priestley called the new gas "dephlogisticated air," a phrase I (for I was Priestley) quite enjoyed saying. (The device above is one of those by means of which the sleazy Lavoisier disproved the phlogiston theory.)
The theoretical question of when and/or in what form(s) discovery happens is interesting, perhaps, but in the play as in real life, what matters is who gets credit. The play imagines the Swedish Academy's introducing a "Retro-Nobel" for scientists who lived and died too early to win Nobel prizes; the chemists decide the most important discovery was oxygen, then get into a brawl over whether Scheele, Priestley or Lavoisier should get the prize, individually or in some combination.
During our one rehearsal on Sunday, the actors groaned and eventually laughed hysterically at what a bad play it is. Part of the difficulty is that the same six actors play the 18th century scientists and their wives, and the 21st century Swedish chemists, changing costume on stage and entering every possible combination of characters - hard to follow if it were staged (and hell for the actors) but well nigh impossible with the actors sitting in a row beind music stands like a chamber ensemble. Another problem is that the play ends without telling us the outcome (I suppose the audience is supposed to continue the discussion; this play is clearly the work of pedagogues). This is most irritating as it's not even a question most of us know how to care about: the least the authors could do is offer us closure! So the only question from the audience was "who won?" - to which, of course, there's no answer.
Or is that another of the lessons the playrights, both famous chemists (one a Nobel prize winner), are hoping to teach - that the reality the scientist explores generally doesn't offer closure, at least not of a dramatically decisive kind? I'm only a few weeks into chemistry myself, but I'm getting the sense (from conversations with my friend who's teaching it mainly) that a certain indeterminacy persists - not just because no one of our models fully captures what we're trying to understand, but also because none of the models is entirely accurate in its predictions either, at least not yet... chemistry abuts quantum physics, after all.
It was fun to be in a play, though, however imperfect the play and limited the possibilities of a reading. The other players were all actors, three professionals and two recent graduates of our theater program, and I was by turns thrilled to hear how effectively they conveyed character and annoyed that, while I was probably the only person who understood much of the content of the play (not all, certainly, but I know about phlogiston from 18th century history of science), they all managed to sound much more at home with it!
UPDATE: Here's a Scheele for 2008.
