You may have heard that the infamous Schrodinger’s cat is simultaneously dead and alive, but did you know that it is also a contortionist? Or at least you might have thought so, had you attended the first night of the American Physical Society’s March Meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada, and seen the world premiere of Cosmic Tumbles, Quantum Leaps, a physics-inspired circus performance.
Smitha Vishveshwara, March Meeting chair and physics professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, introduced the event as adding a missing piece to the day’s programme of scientific lectures and workshops: physical form in action. Physics often stretches the imagination, like when it deals with bizarre objects such as black holes, and can be awe-inspiring and existential, with images of newborn galaxies and theories about what time is. But Vishveshwara wanted to complement these “practices of mind and soul” with a more tangible practice of the body.
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Cosmic Tumbles, Quantum Leaps was performed by , a company of young contortionists, acrobats, aerialists and musicians from Los Angeles. It was co-created by the company’s director Nathalie Yves Gaulthier and physicist-turned-performance artist Julia Roth, and was set to a voice-over narrative written by Vishveshwara.
The half-hour performance included several embodied interpretations of foundational physics concepts. A young contortionist dressed in a lion costume was carried on stage in a plexiglass box while the voice-over informed the room full of physicists that Erwin Schrodinger devised a “devilish device” for his cat. Acrobats spun and jumped in complementary ways or mimicked each other to convey that particles were correlated or entangled. These effects are most often prominent on subatomic scales, far from the naked eye, but the performers transformed them into something larger and more spectacular.
But Cosmic Tumbles, Quantum Leaps also aimed to say more than just “physics can be made to look cool”. The piece kept returning to ideas of nearby performers influencing each other and exhibiting collective motion, like atoms or particles of light, as Vishveshwara’s voice-over repeatedly boomed, almost like a chant, words like “together” and “in unison”. In one notable moment, a performer climbed onto the shoulders of two older peers and executed a stunning series of handstands, jumps and mid-air spins. The three demonstrated cooperation, as you might discover among electrons within some exotic material, but also a sense of trust that comes from working together.
Le PeTiT CiRqUe has previously performed for the Dalai Lama and at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert, so mixing the physical with the more spiritual isn’t new to the troupe. In fact, they closed the show with a routine involving an inflated ball painted like Earth, implying that here, too, togetherness is needed. For the audience of mostly physicists, the experience was a shift from rigorous science work where imagination usually hides in equations and experimental design, instead of a glittery and shiny spectacle worthy of a Las Vegas stage. You couldn’t blame a casual observer for mistaking some of the leaps and tumbles for just that, rather than a meditation on science.
Yet, after the show, the chatter among the performers as they were shaking hands with delighted researchers was all about Schrodinger’s cat – embodying it seemed to have really engaged their own imaginations about our physical world.
