*THE PLAYWRIGHT’S INSPIRATION
From AJ Baker:
The story in ENTANGLEMENT is inspired by a subject I keep coming back to, in my work and my life: how do we deal with the consequences – however unintended – that our actions have on other people? In this play, I’m mixing a little bit of stage craft with a little bit of science to explore a variation on my favorite theme.
**A LITTLE BIT OF STAGE-CRAFT: The action in my play centers around the rehearsals of Emma’s play, which is also named ENTANGLEMENT. Emma has written her play in an attempt to show Luke something she feels unable to tell him. She’s not the first person to try this technique! The ghost of Shakespeare’s Hamlet –with its infamous play within a play to “catch the conscience of the king” –haunts both her script and mine (and so does the spectre of Pinter’s Betrayal ).
**A LITTLE BIT OF SCIENCE: I’ve always found physics fascinating, and in recent years I’ve become particularly fascinated by quantum mechanics, the branch of physics that deals with our universe at its most micro level. I’m no scientist, but there’s enough information out there in layman’s language to make dilletantes like me dangerous! Because last year was the fiftieth anniversary of John Stewart Bell’s groundbreaking paper on quantum entanglement, there’s plenty of commentary out there on what Einstein (derisively) called “spooky action at a distance.”
At its most simplistic, the theory of entanglement tells us that once two particles become entangled, what happens to one will always affect the other. The language of quantum mechanics sounds a lot like the language of love: particles become entangled, they have relationships with each other, they communicate across time and space, they are part of one system together. Fifty years after Bell’s Theorem was published, scientists are using entanglement to develop quantum cryptography, quantum computers, quantum-logic clocks and even quantum teleportation.
Given the huge scope and ever-increasing uses for quantum entanglement, why couldn’t an enterprising scientist — like the one in Emma’s play — come up with a quantum theory to explain love?