Science plays on stage

Djerassi replies: William Bennett’s ill-tempered missive starts with an astounding premise: Expertise in a subject is automatically tainted with bias. He implies that only persons uncontaminated with experience or knowledge of a field should serve as reviewers. He calls my review “undeservedly nasty,” despite my having called Shepherd-Barr’s book “a well-written and super-detailed account … [with] excellent analyses of some contemporary science plays such as Copenhagen.” The fact that I highlighted some glaring deficiencies—perhaps less elegantly than Robert M. Friedman’s lukewarm review of the same book ¹ —based on quotations with specific page references can hardly be called bias. Bennett whines about my having written two reviews: In fact, Physics Today invited me to review the book after having been informed that I had already accepted an earlier request from American Theatre for a major rebuttal—rather than just a review—of Shepherd-Barr’s book.

Bennett’s two paragraphs dealing with Copenhagen have nothing to do with my review, in which I describe Shepherd-Barr’s chapter as a “genuinely thorough and sophisticated analysis,” although I expressed surprise at her quoting approvingly the French director Jean-Francois Peyret’s wisecrack that Copenhagen is “fake theatre.” Bennett then regurgitates historical facts about Bohr and Heisenberg with which I am in total agreement. But his last paragraph, notably the last two sentences, is ludicrous. Nowhere do I state that the fact that my “science plays” have been translated into 15 languages, performed in many theaters, published in book form, and broadcast by the BBC World Service, National Public Radio, the German public broadcasting institution Westdeutscher Rundfunk, and other media make them great triumphs. What I did say is that Shepherd-Barr’s listing of dozens of plays that have been neither staged nor published and are thus beyond the scrutiny of any reader, biased or unbiased, can hardly justify some of her sweeping generalizations. Even Bennett concedes that “judging them theatrically would have been premature.” In that case what utility does such a hodgepodge list have in a book that emphasizes theatricality of science on the stage?