Bang! Tales From Physics
Daniel Traister profile
M 4:30-7:10
Many stories concern the building and deployment of nuclear weapons in
1945: physicists themselves tell their own stories
("autobiographies"), other writers tell physicist's stories for them
("biographies"), and some attempt a different representation of these
events ("fiction"). These stories and the ways in which they
construct our understanding of "the" story are the subject of this
course. Readings include works by and about Jeremy Bernstein,
Friedrich Duerrenmatt, Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Todd Gitlin,
John Hersey, Alan Lightman, Russell McCormmach, Thomas McMahon, Robert
Oppenheimer, C. P. Snow, and William Carlos Williams. We will also
look at a number of films and operas: e.g. Joseph Sargent's Day One;
Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove; Philip Glass's Einstein on the
Beach, and perhaps Bela Bartok's operatic treatment of a related myth,
Bluebeard's Castle. This course will require two short papers and one
final paper. (NOTE: This is an ideal course for all majors
concentrating in the twentieth-century as a period; it may also be
counted toward concentrations in the novel as genre, even though many
texts read here will not be "fictional.")
updated 2006-10-09
