Physics for plays, not for work

After a performance last spring of The Trial of Abdus Salam, a woman who had known the Nobel Prize–winning physicist came up to Nilanjan P. Choudhury, who wrote and directed the play, and delivered gratifying praise. “I got a jolt,” she told him. “For a moment, I thought Salam was back.”

Choudhury originally set out to become a physicist, but along the way, he got cold feet. In 1994, after he had completed his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, he decided to start over. “A business school degree is the last refuge for the confused,” he says. “At that point in my life, I was confused.”

Choudhury pursued a career in software. After nearly a quarter century, he left his corporate job to focus on writing, directing, acting, and science communication.

In addition to three plays about physicists, Choudhury’s writings include novels and a political satire to protest the Karnataka state government’s plans to build a tunnel beneath Lalbagh Botanical Garden in Bengaluru. The satire, a musical, opened on 19 October.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why did you go into physics?

I got into physics because I loved maths and physics when I was a teenager. I was thrilled when I was selected by the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. At that time, I dreamt of becoming a professional physicist and academic.

What changed?

Somewhere around my fourth or fifth year, I started to lose confidence in my ability to do physics research at the professional level. After my master’s, I went to the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. I got into software and stayed for almost 24 years. It paid my bills. And it had its unique charm since it was at the time that the industry was booming in India.

But my love of physics stayed with me. In college, I had also discovered a love for theater, which I pursued on the side during my corporate journey.

How did you get into writing?

The seed of my journey that brought together physics and theater was when I watched Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen in 2009. Later, I played Werner Heisenberg. I was blown away by the play—the nonlinearity, the way it unfolds, the whole idea of scientists not working in isolation but being a part of society, being prey to the frailties of humans, whether it’s ego, frustration, ambition, or the great joy of discovery. It was an intoxicating mixture that was not common in theater.

Then, around 2014, I read a review of the book Empire of the Stars: Obsession, Friendship, and Betrayal in the Quest for Black Holes, about Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and Arthur Eddington. I said to myself, There is a story here.

For six to eight months, I was entirely lost in research. The core of the story grabbed me by the throat. Here’s a young 19-year-old boy [Chandra] who essentially stumbles on the idea that stars can collapse under their own gravitational weight. Chandra had gone into physics because, at age 10, he read a book by Eddington. He honored him his whole life, mentioning him 11 times in his Nobel lecture 53 years later. But Eddington led him up the garden path. He buried Chandra’s work and made sure it stayed buried. And then there was Lalitha, Chandra’s wife, who was herself fascinating. I thought a play was the right format to tell the story. I wrote The Square Root of a Sonnet in 2015.

What convinced you to go full time into theater and adjacent activities?

I took a conscious decision that what I really enjoy is physics, theater, and storytelling. In 2020, I quit my corporate job. I helped friends start the Curiouscity Discovery Centre in Bengaluru and continue to serve as an adviser. It’s a hands-on science experience center targeted at middle and high school students—it’s like a mini version of the San Francisco Exploratorium.

How do you get ideas?

One thing leads to another. When I was researching the story around Chandra and Eddington, my research naturally led me to some exploration of those times, between the early 1900s to say 1960 or 1970. Early in that period, you had special relativity, then quantum mechanics. There was a flowering of physics. There were incredible things happening on the Indian subcontinent too.

Abdus Salam’s name popped up in something I was reading, and his story fascinated me. He was instrumental in the Pakistani nuclear program; without him, it may not have taken off at all. But he was accused of selling out to the enemy, the enemy being India. He maintained that Islam was the source of inspiration for his physics, yet he was disowned by his country and labeled a heretic because he belonged to a small community of Islam, the Ahmadiyya, that were considered nonbelievers. Reportedly on government orders, the word “Muslim” was erased from his gravestone, which now says he “became the first Nobel laureate for his work in physics”—an absurdity. As with Chandra, there was conflict, the lifeblood of storytelling.

And you have an upcoming play?

Right now, my play on Salam is keeping me busy. Although I am not acting in it, I am directing it. It was performed last spring in Trieste, Italy, at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, which Salam founded. That was part of the centennial celebration of his birth.

My third physics-related play is Invisible Particles. I know that once I take up directing it, it will consume me for a while.

Tell me about Invisible Particles.

The protagonists are the Austrian physicist Marietta Blau and Bibha Chowdhuri, the first Indian woman to get a physics PhD. Chowdhuri’s work was pathbreaking, and shockingly, until 20 or 25 years ago, 99.9% of the physics community hadn’t heard of her.

In the 1930s, Chowdhuri and her adviser, D. M. Bose, picked up Blau’s work on photographic emulsions and attempted to discover the meson, the particle that was believed to be responsible for the strong nuclear force. It had been predicted by Hideki Yukawa.

After World War II broke out, Chowdhuri and Bose had to suspend their experiments because the photographic films they needed were requisitioned by the British for the war effort. By the time the war stopped, Cecil Powell in England was well on his way to discovering the meson. In 1950, Powell was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. His achievements built on work by both Blau and Chowdhuri, but history remembers him and not them.

Blau’s and Chowdhuri’s lives are strangely interconnected: Chowdhuri missed the Nobel Prize by a whisker. Blau was nominated for it multiple times. Neither ever held a permanent job in physics; both drifted across the globe taking up whatever assignments were available. Neither of them received anything close to the recognition they deserved.

My play is an attempt to tell the story of their resilience, of “never say die.” I think there are a lot of people, men and women, who go through that sort of journey—not just in science, but in everything that is creative and difficult.

How do you research your plays?

I read everything I can about the subjects. The second part of my process is to talk to people who had known the protagonists. This was relatively easy with Chandra and Salam because they had become prominent public figures. But with Blau and especially Chowdhuri, there was a paucity of archival material, and they didn’t leave behind diaries, letters, or interviews. I was able to talk to people who knew Chowdhuri personally. Once a play is written, I send a draft to scientists in the relevant fields and to the protagonists’ colleagues and families to seek feedback.

I make clear that this is not a documentary. It is based on fact, but also on imagination. I wonder, Would this person have done this? Or thought that? That is the sort of thing I check with people who knew them as human beings. It’s a gray area.

Is there anything you’d like to add?

I have come to realize that audiences love to be both intellectually challenged and emotionally engaged. The great thing with theater is that you know immediately if it’s working or not.