Materials researchers take the stage
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BEYOND THE LAB ics department quickly became a gathering of students and faculty members across disciplines. These performing arts enthusiasts now meet for three hours in the evening in a lecture hall to examine different ways of conveying emotions, practice improvisation, develop character roles, perfect impersonations, and exercise their voice skills. Once a year, they put together a production at the 1000-capacity Tzavta theater in Tel Aviv. The troupe does it all: design and prepare the costumes and sets, control sound and lighting, advertise their play, and sell tickets. The productions have ranged from Shakespeare classics to more modern plays such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Plays by Israeli dramatist and author Hanoch Levin have become recent favorites. For the typically serious, reserved academics, theater is a chance to loosen up, a respite from the nitty-gritty details and tediousness of research. But beyond being an engaged audience member, being an actor further jogs the brain. This leads to a clarity that can yield ideas, insights, and sometimes a breakthrough. Salomon, who likens theater to meditation, recalls an insightful moment that occurred while she was working on a production of the Levin play Walking in the Dark. Her role involved repeating the same line eight times during the play, expressing it in a different way each time. “This twisted my mind and cleared my brain, allowing me to think in a new way,” she said. For the experimental chemist, the result was an idea for a theoretical research paper recently published in the journal Physical Review Letters. The article describes the interaction between the plasmons (collective oscillations of electrons) in an array of slits in a thin silver film and a layer of molecules deposited near the film’s surface. Salomon had done experiments on this interaction as a postdoctoral researcher at Strasbourg, but had been unable to understand the physical origin behind her results. The idea dawned on her during one of her rehearsals.
Materials researchers take the stage Prachi Patel
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udging by face value, science and the performing arts might not have much in common. One is a hypothesis-driven effort to explain the world around us, often requiring a narrow lens and a dash of skepticism. The other, an exercise to unleash our imagination and create a new world. But in reality, science and theater share many traits: innovation, creativity, teamwork, and problem solving. For over a decade, members of a theater group in the graduate school of Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot have been discovering that science and theater complement each other in unimaginable ways. Dabbling in theater, they say, has made them better scientists by freeing their minds.
“As scientists, our minds aren’t very open,” said Adi Salomon, a chemistry professor at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, who joined the Weizmann theater group soon after she started her PhD program there in 2002. “If someone suggests a new idea, our instinct is to say ‘No, it won’t work.
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