NSF Prelim Proposal

2.

1. Cover Sheet. Be sure to include the program solicitation number and

to check the Preliminary Proposal box.

2. Project Summary. The Project Summary is limited to one single-spaced

page. The first sentence must identify the kind of project: Pathways

The Project Summary is a critical proposal element that must make the essence of the

project clear to the reviewer. It must succinctly identify the project's

Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts in separate sections under these two

headings. If Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts are not explicitly

identified, the proposal will be returned without review.

Project Summary:Our proposal is a request for a Pathways Grant to fund script development for a 60-minute film called Stars in their Eyes: Galileo Meets Shakespeare. At the end of this grant period, we will also deliver a shooting script, script breakdown, and topsheet budget. Our film not only gives valuable historical context for these giants, but addresses the need for better communication and cooperation between the humanities and science. The film creates an imaginary meeting between Galileo Galilei and William Shakespeare in a “celestial pub,” with inserted comments from specialists in the humanities and astronomy, to show how literature and science work together for humanity. The documentary will weave a variety of media together: the drama in the “pub,” on-camera interviews, panning photos of historic etchings and drawings, animated segments, and diagrams of Renaissance optical instruments—to bring to life two larger-than-life historical figures.
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) and William Shakespeare (1564-1616) created foundations for much of modern science and literature, yet they are seldom spoken of together. In Stars in Their Eyes: Galileo Meets Shakespeare, our new interdisciplinary approach brings to light evidence, presented by Ewen Whitaker and others, that Shakespeare may have been using Elizabethan era optics and Galilean telescopes (available in London by 1609) to view the night sky. And, in turn, Maurice Finocchiaro will show that Galileo was more of a literary stylist and artistic draughtsman than most people realize. The actors playing Galileo and Shakespeare will question each other at first regarding the value of their own journeys of exploration, but by the end appreciate each other’s work and similarity. Our team knows that knowledge of common experience and cognitive connections is lost when avenues of mutual benefit and creative collaboration remain overlooked. We will meet the challenge of National Endowment for the Humanities Director James Leach, who called for more collaboration between the arts and sciences in a March 2010 talk, citing C. P. Snow’s lament that crying global problems were going unsolved because of interdisciplinary rivalry and lack of cooperative spirit. As Galileo and Shakespeare challenge each other about their own lives, our experts will answer the questions with revelations about the politics, science, literary styles and worldviews of both men in their own time. And then Galileo and Shakespeare will refer to the world today in the light of their discoveries about the shared humanity of literature and science.

Co-Principal Investigators Chris Impey and Gloria McMillan have assembled an international team of scientific and literary experts who can add context to Galileo’s and Shakespeare’s lives by showing the lively, fictional dialogue they engage in from the vantage point of today's rift between science and humanities. Our team begins the process of filling the current lack of interdisciplinary material that poses a barrier for many academics wishing to build interdepartmental programs, as well as add to public awareness of the need for mutual science and humanities cooperation.

Intellectual Merit: The journey of discovery within the film will raise awareness of the overlap between science and the humanities and how the two fields can aid each other. We will focus on new findings by scientific and literary historians in previously unexplored areas of Galileo’s and Shakespeare’s times and careers. The links between science and the humanities embodied by the two men’s lives will be emphasized as the starting point for a new dialogue that includes the public and academics.

Broader Impacts: A broader impact from our documentary approach is to show how moments of enlightenment and discovery work. Such moments of human discovery have not often been described well. Our script will explore how Galileo’s and Shakespeare’s works were not created fully formed, but were the outcomes of their incremental judgments and leaps of the imagination. The interplay of disciplines in our documentary film will challenge diverse informal audiences to revise their views of the separate worlds of science and the arts. Our interplay of disciplines will highlight the similar cognitive and emotional processes at work in both the scientist and the artist, as well as how these men met social barriers and institutional obstacles to their work.
It is expected that this depiction of the interrelated worlds of science and the humanities will result in two useful changes. First, those within the two academic fields will be challenged to rethink their images of each other. Second, the public will see that simplistic images of scientists and artists serve no useful function in a time of global challenges that require cooperative effort to resolve.

3. Project Description.

a. Project Rationale

* Overview

This proposal is a request for a Pathways Grant to fund script development for a 60-minute film called Stars in their Eyes: Galileo Meets Shakespeare. Since 1962 when C. P. Snow published his famous critique of the rift between science and the humanities The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, things have not improved much. At the time of Snow’s critical book, the atomic bomb gave the humanities field new reason to distrust those engaged in science. Similarly, current questionable miracles of science, such as genetic engineering, as well as science’s inability to halt global warming, go on fueling this acrimonious rivalry. But to what end do many humanists wage war on, or, at best, ignore science?
The public is not interested in interdisciplinary strife but its ill effects touch them. In a May 2009 Pew Research Center poll of 2001 adults, scientists had a higher level of trust (70%) than artists (31%) but this is no cause for rejoicing. Likewise, in Harvard’s Belfer Center Newsletter, James Holdren, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, says that he was convinced in his youth that C. P. Snow made the correct assessment that his text The Two Worlds that science and the arts needed to cooperate if global crises were to be solved (Snow 92). Holdren determined to learn more about both cultures, and work on big global issues where they intersect (par. 3). Directors of public planetariums have long perceived the need for better reporting of the actual level of the interplay between science and the humanities. In a letter of support to the Principal Investigators of this project, E. C. Krupp, Director of the Griffith Observatory, observes that“Although the significant and evolving relationships between literature and astronomy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have been documented and explored, they are not widely appreciated by the public.” The crises of today require interdisciplinary collaboration and public confidence if we wish to create sustainable conditions on earth.

The goal of Stars in their Eyes: Galileo Meets Shakespeare is to awaken public interest and understanding of the need for better communication between science and the humanities by engaging science-attentive audiences in the interwoven careers of Galileo and Shakespeare. The project team has amassed new evidence of activity by each man in the other’s field and traces the strategies each pursued in his process of invention and boundary-crossing. The script will follow a journey of discovery from mutual skepticism between the two historic figures to a growing appreciation of each other’s achievements and methods.

This documentary’s approach shows dramatically how differences may be handled between disciplines. To refine the script, there will be focus sessions with readers from academic disciplines and the public to revise the text in ways that increase reader (viewer) comprehension of the issue of civility and good communication between disciplines. In the humanities, keynote speakers in the last decade to both the Conference on College Composition and Communications (CCCC) and The Modern Language Association (MLA) have outlined the gulf between the two cultures and what might be done to bridge the gap. In his 2005 essay in the national MLA journal Profession, the then-MLA president, Robert Scholes, decried the humanities’ inability even to define itself without “setting up science as their opposite, an opposite regularly regarded from the humanistic point-of-view with a mixture of suspicion and envy” (8). Scholes argued that those in the humanities “need to explain more clearly to scientists what we are doing and why we are doing it,” as well as helping scientists, who work in a climate of broad scientific illiteracy, to explain their work to students (8). And this effort to improve communication should involve the sciences, as well.

* Project Goals (STEM)

The primary goal of Stars in their Eyes: Galileo Meets Shakespeare film project is to awaken public interest and understanding of the need for better communication between science and the humanities.

In particular, thisfilm project will

  • offer insights into how “the modern world” arose in both literature and science
  • demonstrate how the scientific revolution of 400 years ago changed human society when Galileo upgraded scientific methods
  • compare Galileo’s scientific achievements, his public fame and endeavors with Shakespeare’s
  • dramatize Galileo’s collision with the Church, thereby elevating him from scientist to martyr
  • dramatize how Shakespeare revolutionized theater by challenging court and church authorities
  • connect the major themes of science and Galileo’s life with the reestablishment of democracy in the New World
  • connect major themes of the humanities with the new philosophy of Copernicus by showing how Shakespeare portrayed the night sky and how the English Church reacted.

* Target Audience

The target audience for our project will be both “science-attentive” and “science-interested” people of various ages as classified by Rafael Pardo [1999]. The distinction between the groups interested in science is that the “science- attentive” have more knowledge that the “science-interested.” Our project’s goal is to show how science relates to the humanities via two great historical figures. We need to informally present history, combining the arts with science, since polls show that the public does not understand basic science well, although they are interested when relevant information is given. In basic astronomical knowledge, only about 50% know that it takes the earth one year to travel around the sun [NSF, 2008, chapter 7]. But public interest exists and, when asked if “learning about science and new science discoveries” describes them, about three-fourths of Americans said it describes them either very (43%) or somewhat (31%) well [Horrigan 2006]. While the prior education of the public may hold gaps, a striking presentation can quickly fill in knowledge. Our project fills the void with engaging interplay between the colorful personalities of Galileo and Shakespeare. We will not only convey basic facts of science but cultural history to a broad public. Televised documentaries and downloadable videos are a prime source of information for more than half the public, according to an NSF poll from 2008. We will meet our public in relaxed informal settings and spark their interest, including the interest of the young, because our enactments hold humor alongside academic content.

* Broader Impacts and Intellectual Merit

Two broader impacts from our documentary approach are, first, to aid in solving crises via better communication, and second, to show how moments of enlightenment and discovery work. Poor inter-disciplinary communication worsens what is arguably the most contentious issue in today’s schools: whether or not to teach evolution. When students grasp that the sciences and the humanities (which includes Bible study) use different types of evidence, they will come to see that not communicating well enough to understand this fundamental point is a major obstacle to resolving the conflict.

Secondly, moments of human discovery have not often been described well. Our Stars in their Eyes: Galileo Meets Shakespeare script will explore how Galileo’s and Shakespeare’s works were not created fully formed, but were the outcomes of their incremental judgments and leaps of the imagination. The interplay of disciplines in our documentary film will challenge diverse informal audiences to revise their views of the separate worlds of science and the arts. Our interplay of disciplines will highlight the similar cognitive and emotional processes at work in both the scientist and the artist, as well as how they met social barriers and institutional obstacles to their work.

Stars in their Eyes will have other impacts, as well. This project will show methods to bridges of understanding between stakeholders, who often perceive themselves as competitors for scarce resources, as well as factual information about the histories of science and the humanities.

b. Project Design

Our approach to creating a script for an informal science documentary is to ask questions about disciplinary boundaries, such as whether Shakespeare’s curiosity about the night sky existed, as science historian Peter Usher claims. We also investigate whether Galileo should be considered a great literary stylist, as is claimed by his biographer Andrea Frova. Our project’s approach to these historical figures is to show viewers two very different men than those who have come down to us pigeonholed as if for eternity in two intellectual camps: Shakespeare the playwright and Galileo the scientist. Frova cites the rich human element and power of Galileo’s style as setting the course for the future of Italian prose and our consultant Darko Suvin notes that the Italian admiration of Galileo’s writing is well documented. In our documentary, we counter frozen categories to reveal that our two protagonists were interested in everything around them. Why should they not serve, in this new view, to inspire the youth of today to link knowledge in new and unusual ways? In a series of scenes with the two men that are linked to commentaries by present-day specialists in academic fields, we hope to stir the minds and emotions of a diverse audience.

* Implementation and Deliverables

Stars in their Eyes: Galileo Meets Shakespeare will create a documentary linked to educational multimedia. Our interrelated deliverables will increase audience interest by adding depth and context not present in the documentary itself. Chief Consultant and co-scriptwriter David Levy, discoverer of Comet Schumaker-Levy and an Emmy-winning science popularizer, will shape both our script and allied educational deliverables.
Stars in their Eyes will provide methods to open dialogue between disciplines, so our allied educational material will include references in both humanities and science literature to help guide both the public and teachers to new ways of thinking about our “two worlds” of science and the arts. N observational researcher like David Levy has communication skills that will assist our team effort to produce products that engage the broadest audience. We will enhance the accuracy and depth of our scientific presentation with the engaging creativity of theater.

Finally, Stars in their Eyes will be a rare glimpse of collaborative effort in the two worlds that is planned to lead to other joint ventures. The membrane between science and humanities is a thin one and such topics as the cognitive processes of “Aha!” moments on both fields are planned for further investigation and demonstration to the public.

* Project Dissemination, Promotion, and Sustainability

Dr. Levy will host an episode of his syndicated radio show Let’s Talk Stars regarding our project ( With the support requested here, Levy will create his radio show episode in addition to his work on our film project script.

The Stars in their Eyes: Galileo Meets Shakespeare team will pilot our educational media locally, in tandem with partial presentations of our documentary-in-progress. Pilot focus group comments will aid our team in revising the deliverables for optimum interest and goal-directed learning. The group, working singly or in pairs, are already presenting the broad outline of our project to focus groups around town such as college alumni organizations (Harvard, Yale are already scheduled), the Tucson Association of Physics teachers (TAPT), The Kuiper Circle (The University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Lab’s Outreach for Education Committee). These group’s comments will lead us to design revisions and possible contacts for dissemination.