The Dicethrower

Loosely based on the life and times of Albert Einstein, The Dicethrower is a poetic drama about the quest for certainty in an uncertain world. Dreistein, a physicist in Parallel Universe number 3, seeks certainty in mathematics, knowing that to do so is to discard most of life. Two physicists set out with questions about time and find strange answers about chance. A pacifist fails to live at peace with his wife, and initiates the project which bombed Hiroshima. A scientific hero and celebrity, voted the Man of the Century, complains that everything he touched turned into quark (German for mess). A country, which science helped to make great, holds a clearance sale of its brains. We see the increasing politicization of science as the search for truth begins to deliver power: the Military-Industrial Complex. Part 1, WWI, shows men producing the chemical explosives and chemical weapons of mass destruction which are still in use. Part 2, WWII, shows scientists of the highest reputation for pacifism and philosophy initiating the nuclear explosives which are a million times worse - and still with us, only more so. This drama presents poetry, passion, science and history. The physics are as accurate and up-to-date as the author could make them after consulting physics books and some of the original papers; the main biographical and historical facts are as accurate as human affairs would allow. So, read as prose, it forms quite an interesting potted digest of physics and war in "the world of yesteryear". The style of presentation varies from comedy or pathos, to slapstick or tragic farce. It has been said that history repeats itself - first as tragedy and then as farce. The relevance of these characters is not their history but our present - and our future.