6 selected scientists are randomly assigned to 6 selected filmmakers. Each pair only has one week to create science-inspired short films themed Hybrid-Identity. As one of the selected scientists, I was incredibly lucky to be paired up with the wonder Inés Vogelfang. Right away we were bouncing ideas back and forth, excitedly adding new thoughts and suggestions. With only one week to complete a film, we had to have faith in our ideas and didn't have time to address any doubts. Here we describe our behind the scenes thought process through a discussion between Ines and myself (Merritt).
INES: When I heard that the theme for the Imagine Science film competition would be Identity-Hybrid, I recalled how the Argentinean author Borges quoted Heraclitus: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man”.
It’s hard to be bold enough to be always the same person, it is pretty tough to be the same person in the workspace, as the person you are at home, as the person you are when you’re around your family. We are conformed by our different identities, and our different ways of behaving in front of people.
As an Argentinean in the States there are certain things I can’t do, certain things I can’t say. In the academic environment my behaviour is not the same as my behaviour in my home, so I feel like we carry all these different identities with us. We take from the other to create ourselves, and we take from ourselves at home to create ourselves at work.
How do we show ourselves to the world? How can we balance all these “selves” ?
MERRITT: Which then lead us to the discussion of perception and observation. From a scientific point of view, let’s take for example the theory of relativity. It tells us that if you think two things occur at the same time, that’s just subjective opinion. Someone else could conclude that actually those two events didn’t happen at the same time, but at separate times. Meaning that simultaneity is merely a subjective impression.
Which then lead us to discuss observation. First, culturally how do we change our behaviours based off who observes us. How do stereotypes and prejudices change our how we act, and what we can achieve. How does who and how we are observed change our identity.
Secondly as a scientist, I study quantum optics in the Atomic and Laser Physics dept in Oxford (handed in my phd thesis last week!). And we deal with the phenomena of light all the time- in particular how observation affects the wave-particle duality of light. I wanted to explain this to Ines. The best lecture about this particle-wave duality is from the 1960s by Richard Feynman, which thankfully is archived and I could share with her.