"Annie Jump and the Library of Heaven" Study Guide

STUDY GUIDE

ANNIE JUMP and the

ANNIE

LIBRARY

JUMP

and the

OF HEAVEN

LIBRARY

OFBy Reina HEAVEN Hardy

FEBRUARY 27, MARCH 1, 7 at 8:00pm, March 9 at 5:00pm UT Laboratory Theatre

Study Guide by Briana Bower

Annie Jump is a 13-year-old science genius whose alienobsessed father is the laughingstock of Strawberry, Kansas.

One night in August, a meteor falls, and Annie meets Althea, an intergalactic supercomputer that manifests itself in the form of a mean girl with really nice hair. Althea’s here to help Annie take humanity from the earth to the stars, but being the Chosen One isn't all glory. What is Althea hiding? And what will Annie have to sacrifice to fulfill her destiny?

February 27, March 1, 7 at 8:00pm, March 9 at 5:00pm UT Laboratory Theatre

Annie Jump is a 13-year-old science genius whose alienobsessed father is the laughingstock of Strawberry, Kansas.

One night in August, a meteor falls, and Annie meets Althea, an intergalactic supercomputer that manifests itself in the form of a mean girl with really nice hair. Althea’s here to help Annie take humanity from the earth to the stars, but being the Chosen One isn't all glory. What is Althea hiding? And what will Annie have to sacrifice to fulfill her destiny?

Ticket Information Tickets: $10-12 512-477-6060 / JoinTheDrama.org

My Story Hi, my name is Annie Jump and these are my field notes! I fill this notebook with all sorts of things I find interesting, but before you start reading, let me tell you a little bit about myself. I'm thirteen years old, I'm about to go to high school in the fall, and I've lived in Strawberry, Kansas for most of my life. I was named after Annie Jump Cannon, a scientist who worked at the Harvard Observatory from 1896 to around 1941 classifying stars. During her time at Harvard, she

developed her own way of classifying stars by their temperatures, and she classified more than 225,000 stars!

Annie Jump Cannon worked with other women in the Harvard Observatory, but at the time, women were not able to be scientists, so instead they were called “computers” because it was their job to collect/analyze – or “compute” – information about the stars. One particularly famous woman Annie Jump Cannon worked with was named

Henrietta Swan Leavitt. Like Cannon, Leavitt revolutionized the field of astronomy with her discovery of Cepheid variable stars. She

discovered that the light (or luminosity) of these stars was different from other stars astronomers had observed in the past. This discovery helped scientists realize that the Milky Way was

not the only galaxy in the universe, measure the distance between galaxies!

The amazing work of these two women proved to many that woman could be scientists, and paved the way for young scientists like me!

Though I’m not sure they ever experienced what I’ve been going through lately. You see, one night this past August, a meteor fell out of the sky, and my life changed. That night, I met Althea, an intergalactic supercomputer. Althea’s here to help me take humanity from the earth to the stars, but being the Chosen One isn't all glory. How would you react if you found out you were the Chosen One? What would you do?

Dad

Who’s Who!

(Dr. Jump) KJ

Me!

Althea

Mrs. Gomez

These are the people (or characters) in my story! I decided to draw them in the style of two of my favorite science sites online! xkcd.com is a great web comic written by Randall Monroe, a scientist

who used to work with NASA!

Minute Physics is a series of webisodes that explain scientific concepts like Gravity and Dark Matter. Check them out on youtube!

Q & A With the Playwright I sat down to talk to Reina Hardy, the

playwright who wrote Annie Jump and the

Library of Heaven, and she told me a little bit about how she created this play!

Q: Wh at inspired you to write th is play?

A: Annie, Althea, and the Library of Heaven popped into my head after I re-read a book called "Coming of Age in the Universe," which is basically a history of science as practiced by human beings. The last chapter talks about the possibility of the universe "evolving" a brain, which is how I thought of the Library. Another important source was an NPR story about a man who, just like Dr. Jump, maintains a website inviting messages from alien life forms. I heard that story years ago, but it took a while to percolate. In fact, I'd first read about the universe "evolving" a brain years ago also... but I didn't know how to write about either of those things until I discovered Annie and Althea’s.

Q: Wh at is your writing process like? Does it change from play to play?

A: It does change from play to play, but here are the basics: 1.

Get an idea.

Sit on it for a month to five years.

2. Start with someone on stage, doing something. end.

Keep going until the

Try to do this part very quickly, in less than a month.

3. Shove it in a drawer for a while.

4. Spend the next three years rewriting.

At this point, if the play has promise, I can usually get a production.

I try

to be there for the entire rehearsal process, because that means I can do even more rewrites! (Notice how much of this process is rewriting?)

Continued on the next page!

Q: Wh at kin d of research did you do in order to incorporate

specific scientific theories into the play? How did that research impact your writing process?

A: I did a ton of reading, and I got to know a couple of scientists.

I toured Fermilab.

"Annie Jump" is the third science play that I

wrote, and in the first two I was kind of shoving science in. talk about science.

The characters would But with " Annie Jump"

the plot comes from science- it's much more integral, and that's because I got more comfortable with it.

Q: Did you work with scientists at

Fermilab is AMAZING!! They do research in “high energy physics� and explore questions like: What is the universe made of? How does it work? And where did it come from?

any point durin g this p rocess, and if so what was that like?

A: During this process, not really, but I did send the script to some scientists that I've worked with in the past, for fact-checking purposes.

I got a lot of great extra details from that! I think that

writers should go out of their way to communicate with scientists there's so much material there, and we're more alike than you'd think!

Q: Wh at do you hop e audiences will take away from your play?

A: The more you learn about the universe, the more awesome and beautiful it is.

And the more you understand the sheer awesomeness of

the universe, the luckier you'll feel to live on Earth.

- and it's got a great view.

It's an amazing place

Q: Any other fun stories about the play you want to share?

A: I wrote this draft in less than a week.

In fact, I wrote it while the

Perseids were falling in Chicago! I drove outside of the city and looked at the sky for inspiration, just like Annie.

Trying to Make Contact For centuries, humans have gazed up at the stars and wondered what else might be out there. Many scientists have devoted great amounts of time and effort to trying to find what else or who else resides in our vast

universe. One organization, known as SETI, takes the search to a whole new

level.

SETI, which stands for the “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence” is committed to this search for life in the universe. According to SETI, it is their mission to “explore, understand and explain the origin, nature, and prevalence of life in the universe.”

Founded in 1984, SETI is now run by astronomer Jill Tarter, who headed off Project Phoenix - the largest targeted

search for extraterrestrial life to date (she and her team searched over 750 star systems!) Tarter often encourages others to

look towards the stars, saying: “'Are we alone?' Humans have been asking [this question] forever.

The probability of success is difficult to estimate, but if we never search the chance of success is zero.”

In order to do this amazing research, SETI uses the Allan Telescope Array.

The Telescope is a “Large Number of Small Dishes” which allows SETI to run lots of tests all at once! What do you

think SETI might find? What would you want to find among the stars if you were looking?

For more information about SETI, check out www.seti.org, or take a look at Jill Tarter’s recent TED-ed talk titled “Calculating the Odds of Intelligent Alien Life.”

A Message to the Stars In 1977, NASA launched two Voyager space probes to study the planetary systems of Jupiter and Saturn, but

since then the probes have explored much farther than those two systems! Each probe carried a Voyager Golden Record. The records contained sounds, images, and

information about earth, designed to help any extraterrestrial life form that might find it to better

understand our world.

Something to Th ink About •

If you were asked to create a document or an object like this record that helped extraterrestrial life better understand our

world, what type of information would you want to you include? •

Carl Sagan and his team at NASA chose a Golden Record when they sent out their message. How would you present information about our planet now?

Know Your Town’s Dark-Sky Rating!

The Bortle Dark-Sky Scale helps people classify how dark the sky is in their town/city. The scale ranges from 1 – 9, 1 being the darkest sky and 9 being the lightest. Strawberry, Kansas has a dark sky rating of 2, which means you can really see the stars!

Often in cities there is a lot of light pollution – meaning the light from the buildings, streetlamps, cars, etc. makes it hard to see the sky. But if

you go out to more rural areas (or even turn off your lights) the stars are much clearer! Step outside tonight, and see if you can figure out your area’s Dark-Sky Rating!

Why Look for Dark Skies?

So you can see the Perseids Meteor Shower!

Every year during the month of August people all over the Northern Hemisphere can witness one of the best nighttime light shows, also known as the Perseids Meteor Shower. When

Earth passes through the orbital path of the Comet known as “Swift-Tuttle” the debris from the comet’s trail enters the Earth’s atmosphere and burns up, causing the meteor shower! If you want to catch the shower this summer, find a dark spot on the night of August 12th and get ready to see some meteors!

Ask an Astronomer!

Recently, I got a chance to talk with Astronomer Rachael Livermore, who currently works at the University of Texas at Austin in their Astronomy department! She had some awesome things to say about her work, so I thought I would share them with you!

Q: What inspired you to pursue astronomy?

A: I think most children at some point lie awake at night contemplating the idea of infinity; does the Universe end, and if so what's beyond the edge?

And beyond that? The difference for scientists is simply that we never grew out of asking those questions.

Q: What do you currently do? What do you research ?

A: My work involves trying to figure out how galaxies form. We now know that every star in the night sky - plus billions more that are too far away or faint to see - make up just one galaxy, the Milky Way. From mapping the stars we can see, we have a fair idea of what it looks like from the outside: a big, thin disk of stars and gas arranged in spiral arms, with a

bulge at the center made up mostly of older stars and a gigantic black hole. There are lots of other galaxies that look similar, but also many that don't have spiral arms, some that are forming stars and some that aren't, and so on. Why do they look like this? It takes billions of years for them to form, so we can't just sit back and watch them, but we can actually look into the past to see what galaxies used to look like. Whenever you

look at something, you're seeing it as it was in the past, because it takes time for the light to travel to your eyes. When we look at distant galaxies that are only visible with massive telescopes, we see them as they were billions of years in the past. We're now able to see galaxies forming in

the very early years of the Universe, around 13 billion years ago. By comparing what we see at different stages of the Universe's life, we can understand how those early galaxies formed into grand spirals like the Milky Way.

Q: Wh at is your favorite thing about the research you do?

A: The travel is fantastic! To see the most distant reaches of the Universe we have to use the largest telescopes in places that have very dark skies, and which are as high up as possible, to get above the atmosphere that distorts our images.

Most of the best telescopes we use are located on the summit of Mauna

Kea in Hawaii, so we travel there regularly. There's also the opportunity to work abroad; I moved here from the UK after receiving my PhD, and now have friends scattered across Europe, Asia, and Australia.

I also love it when discoveries happen by accident. Sometimes you'll be working on some data thinking you know what it is, but there'll be something unexpected in there. Suddenly you're seeing something no one else in the world has ever seen, and that never stops being cool.

Q: Wh at are some ways to get involved in astronomy/see the stars here in Austin?

A: There's a lot you can see on your own without any equipment: With a pair of binoculars or a small telescope, you can even start to make out distant galaxies that are millions of light years away. If you want to

explore further, there are amateur astronomical societies everywhere. A lot of professional astronomers started out that way. Also, the Astronomy Department here at UT runs public observing nights Wed. Sat. Sun. Visit http://outreach.as.utexas.edu/public/viewing.html for more info!

Q: Any words of wisdom/encouragement for aspirin g scientists?

A: You spend so much of your waking life at work, I can't overstate how important it is to be fundamentally interested in what you do (I know - I used to be an accountant!). If there's something that fascinates you, talk to people who work in that field. Scientists are generally far more approachable than you might think, and like nothing more than to talk about what they do.