“Aether is a play about the unknown, and has multiple narratives colliding and entangling with this ensemble of particles,” Howlett begins, talking a mile a minute because quites simply, the play, like Howlett’s conversation, covers a lot of ground. She continues, “The central story is of Sophie, this PhD student at Cambridge who’s a particle physicist, and she’s working on a dark matter experiment at CERN in Geneva (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research). Physicists are right now this decision because this experiment’s coming to an end with the Large Hadron Collider and they’ve found the Higgs (boson, the particle that confirms the existence of the Higgs field which permeates the universe and gives mass to particles like quarks and electrons), but the next thing behind that supersymmetry of dark matter hasn’t really come forward.
Dark matter, time travel and meta theatre: Emma Howlett on Aether
