Physics plays for the classroom
Eight short plays on the history of the physics your class is studying. Four speaking parts each, no props, about five minutes read aloud. Free to download, copy and perform in school.
They work as a lesson starter, as the last twenty minutes of the final lesson of term, as a cover lesson, or as a way of getting the quiet ones to speak. Each play ends with three discussion questions.
What’s in the set
1. The Gold Foil — 4.4 Atomic structure
Rutherford · Geiger · Marsden · Thomson. Manchester, 1909. An undergraduate is told to look for something that definitely will not happen. He finds it. Thomson arrives at the end to watch his own model being demolished, and takes it rather well.
2. The Expanding Sky — 4.8 Space physics
Hubble · Slipher · Lemaître · Hoyle. The balloon analogy acted out, a priest predicting the cosmic microwave background, and Fred Hoyle inventing the name ‘Big Bang’ as an insult and having to live with it for ever.
3. The Current War — 4.2 Electricity
Edison · Tesla · Westinghouse · a reporter. New York, 1888. The reporter keeps asking them to explain it simply, which covers P = VI, I²R losses and why a transformer needs alternating current. A good part for a pupil who would rather ask questions than answer them.
4. Beyond the Red — 4.6 Waves
William Herschel · Caroline Herschel · Maxwell · Hertz. A thermometer placed where there is nothing to measure, then a jump forward sixty years to Maxwell’s equations and Hertz insisting his discovery is of no use whatsoever.
5. The Cannon and the Horses — 4.3 Particle model
Count Rumford · a foreman · a defender of caloric · a water-carrier. Munich, 1798. Water boiled without a fire, the caloric theory dismantled, and the best line in the play given to the person nobody was listening to.
6. The Twitching Needle — 4.7 Magnetism
Ørsted · a student · Faraday · Davy. A lecturer is proved wrong mid-lecture by someone in the third row, then Faraday works out the one word everybody before him had missed: change.
7. The Honeymoon Thermometer — 4.1 Energy
James Joule · Amelia Joule · William Thomson · a waiter. Joule really did take a thermometer on his honeymoon to measure whether the bottom of a waterfall is warmer than the top. His wife has views.
8. Two Balls and a Church Lamp — 4.5 Forces
Galileo · Professor Borro · a student · a nun who keeps the cathedral. The tied-balls argument that destroys Aristotle without anybody climbing a tower, and the swinging lamp that became the pendulum clock.
Download
All eight plays in one 18-page PDF. Print the whole thing, or just the pages you need.
How to run one
- Four readers at the front, scripts in hand. No learning lines, no rehearsal, no costumes.
- Each character has a one-line description at the top telling the reader how to play it. That is usually enough.
- Lines marked (to the audience) are said straight out to the class while the others pretend not to hear.
- Run the three discussion questions straight afterwards, while they are still in the room with it.
- With a bigger class, run two plays at once in opposite corners and have each group perform to the other.
Is it true?
The people and the science are real. The dialogue is invented, and each play has a footnote saying which bits actually happened. Rutherford’s remark about firing a shell at tissue paper, Hertz saying his discovery had no use whatsoever, Joule’s honeymoon thermometer and Hoyle’s mocking nickname are all genuine. Where a character is invented — the reporter, the water-carrier, the nun — the footnote says so.
Looking for something to follow up with? Try the free exam-style questions on the same topics, or the 17 things you must be able to do in each one.