Please join the cast and creative team for a post-show conversation about the process of creating the world premiere of a new, exciting, adapted work!

Painting a Picture of the Universe: How do artists explore our universe?

Please join us for a Pre-Show Saturday Symposium with Professor Edward J. Hall as we consider the questions: “How do artists (visual artists, musicians, performers) explore – and explain – our universe and its creation? Can art mediate between science and religion?”

Edward J. Hall is the Norman E. Vuilleumier Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. Prior to his current position, he was with MIT’s Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. He works on a range of topics in metaphysics and epistemology that overlap with philosophy of science. (Which is to say: the best topics in metaphysics and epistemology.) Professor Hall’s research and teaching focus on basic philosophical questions about the nature of reality, and about our knowledge of that reality that are prompted by scientific inquiry and reflection.

A Post-Show Conversation with Nobel Laureate Wolfgang Ketterle

Please join us for a post-show conversation with Professor and Nobel Laureate Wolfgang Ketterle as we discuss the relation between scientific and religious narratives.

Wolfgang Ketterle has been the John D. MacArthur professor of physics at MIT since 1998. He received a diploma (equivalent to master’s degree) from the Technical University of Munich (1982), and the Ph.D. in physics from the University of Munich (1986). He did postdoctoral work at the Max-Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching and at the University of Heidelberg in molecular spectroscopy and combustion diagnostics. In 1990, he came to MIT as a postdoc and joined the physics faculty in 1993. Since 2006, he is the director of the Center of Ultracold Atoms, an NSF funded research center, and Associate Director of the Research Laboratory of Electronics. His research group studies properties of ultracold atomic matter. For his observation of Bose-Einstein condensation in a gas in 1995, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001. Other honors include the Gustav-Hertz Prize of the German Physical Society (1997), the Rabi Prize of the American Physical Society (1997), the Fritz London Prize in Low Temperature Physics (1999), the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics (2000), and a Humboldt research award (2009).

Creating/Bridging: A Catalyst Conversation with Alan Lightman & Jeff Lieberman

Please join us as Catalyst Conversations hosts physicist and author of Mr g, Alan Lightman, and artist/scientist Jeff Lieberman for a discussion around the role of art in bridging the dialogue between science and religion.

Alan Lightman received his AB degree in physics from Princeton University in 1970 and his PhD in theoretical physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1974. He has received four honorary degrees. From 1974 to 1976, Mr. Lightman was a postdoctoral fellow in astrophysics at Cornell. During this period, he began publishing poetry in small literary magazines. He was an assistant professor of astronomy at Harvard from 1976 to 1979 and from 1979 to 1989 a research scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. In 1989, Mr. Lightman was appointed professor of science and writing, and senior lecturer in physics, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was the first professor at MIT to receive a joint appointment in the sciences and the humanities. In 2004, Mr. Lightman cofounded the Catalyst Collaborative at MIT, which is a collaboration between MIT and the Underground Railway Theater of Boston. The Catalyst Collaborative aims to convey science and the culture of science through theater. CC@MIT commissions new plays and produces existing plays that involve science or scientists. Mr. Lightman’s novel Einstein’s Dreams was an international bestseller and has been translated into thirty languages. More than two dozen independent theatrical and musical productions have been based on Einstein’s Dreams, including a production by the Catalyst Collaborative and Underground Railway Theater in Cambridge in April 2007, which, like Mr g, was adapted and directed by Wesley Savick.

Jeff Lieberman explores the connections between the arts, sciences, education, creativity, and consciousness. He hosted ‘Time Warp’ on the Discovery Channel, reminding us how little our senses detect and understand about reality. He composes music in the duo Knolls. He shows sculptures internationally, exploring our unseen interconnectedness and interdependence. Having finished four degrees at MIT (Physics, Math, Mech. Eng., Media Arts + Sciences), he is exploring how the evolution of consciousness can cease human suffering.

How does age affect our impressions of the character of “g”?

Please join youth from Abundant Life Youth Ministry and our own Youth Underground Ambassadors Gwendolyn Baptiste and Trinidad Ramkissoon for a Mass Humanities Event as we discuss Mr g from a more youthful perspective and answer the questions: “How does our age impact the impressions we have of the characters? Does g have an age? Does the age of the Creator matter?”

Gwendolyn Baptiste is a member of the Youth Underground Ambassador Ensemble at Central Square Theater. She’s sung with Opera Boston through the Boston Children’s Chorus in their production of Madame White Snake. She’s also acted in ensembles through the Charles River Creative Arts Program. She looks forward to exploring the topics of science and spirituality, both individually, and how they relate, and to dialoguing about the philosophies touched upon in Mr g.

Trinidad Ramkissoon is in his final year at Boston Day and Evening Academy.  He began performing at the age of eight, when he took on the role of Scar in The Lion King at his elementary school.  Trinidad currently is an Artist In Training with Mssng Lnks and he plans to do a string of productions starting in the spring of 2015 until the end of summer with the company. In addition, he is on tour with Central Square Theater’s Youth Underground Ambassador production of Find Out What It Means To Me. Throughout his acting career he has picked up assistant teaching roles educating elementary students and high school students at Generation Excel, Public Gardens, and Upward Bound Programs in Boston. Trinidad also enjoys modeling, rapping, singing, writing poetry, as well as spending time with family and friends.