Quick: What are the seven innovations that revolutionized the world?

According to Jacob Zimmer’s grade school teacher, our society was revolutionized by Gutenberg’s press, Copernicus’ solar system, Newton’s physics, Darwin’s evolution, as well as the Industrial, Nuclear, and Information Revolutions.

Jacob Zimmer, for his part, was inspired to create a series of shows “Dedicated to the Revolutions,” about these seven great scientific revolutions that are said (by the aforementioned teacher) to have altered the course of humanity.

Bringing together lecture-demo, talent show and contemporary performance, this is theatre that engages the audience in an honest, informal way while remembering that science is fun (and funny).

The latest piece, “I Keep Dropping Sh*t,” opened at MaRS last night and considers the laws of Newtonian physics. It’s playing at MaRS until June 15 as part of the Toronto Fringe Festival.

In the following interview, I asked Jacob Zimmer from Small Wooden Shoe about the show and what he wants to say about innovation in general.

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What motivated you to put this piece together?

For a long time I’ve been interested in history and progress – in trying to figure out how we as a culture got to where we are. My interest is really about grappling with where we, as a culture, are going in the future. And about what we mean by progress. (What kind of progress? Do we just move forward? Is it a straight line? Is it the same for everyone?)

I hit upon the list of seven scientific (and technological, really) revolutions as a great way to frame some of those questions. Science and technology have, for a few hundred years now been very clear indicators and sites of progress and change – and the idea of “revolutions� is interesting because of the great shift implied.

Knowing very little about science, but feeling like science and these revolutions shape my life, I thought I should think about them- and so decided to make a series of shows about them with one big performance at the end (February 2008).

What are you trying to achieve with the performance?

I want to excite curiosity, mostly. To encourage myself and anyone who sees it to think about the world differently. And to do that while having a very good time.

I think we as a culture separate thinking and pleasure too much. That we need to recognize that good ideas can be entertaining. And that new things excite us.

The moment of solving a problem or making some kind breakthrough, I imagine, is exciting across all fields – and we’re trying to create a space where that can happen for a group of people together – even if they are realizations that emerge from absurd or silly situations.

People tell me they think a lot about the ideas in the shows afterward and also tend to get the songs stuck in their head – both of which are very satisfying to me.

You include debate as a format in the Revolutions – why?

The last show (“Reasonable People, Reasonably Disagreeing�) was pure high school debate. There’s not so much in this one, but the interest is still the same.

I think talking about stuff is helpful and important. Debate is one way to do that. Holding up two or more positions and making arguments for the validity of them in some kind of civil, articulate way is something we should do more often.

Also, the idea of “reaching a conclusion� is so foreign to the arts and often central to science that I thought it would be fun to try.

I imagine debate is crucial to innovation – the challenging of old ideas and the taking of positions, even if only as thought experiments. I do hope for a kind of debate that is more open and constructive than what seems to happen in the public sphere. To use a basic principle of improvisation – it’s better to say “Yes and…â€? than “No but…â€?

You’ve mashed-up creativity and sciences here – are these two ideas related or on opposite ends of the spectrum?

To me they should be seen as interweaving fields. Both are (or potentially are) fundamentally asking questions about the world we live it – physical, personal and social. The separation between fields is, I think, hurting the world.

How do you think our understanding of gravity (a scientific innovation) has changed our lives?

This unified the rules for the heavens and the earth and was major shift in the how we understand the universe and our place in it.

I think the difficulty and importance of articulation is also quite central to the changes caused by the “Newtonian Revolution.� That we can use observation to articulate principles that describe the universe is a striking belief.

Of course, we’ve understood this for so long that it is rarely thought about anymore, let alone questioned, by the general population. (Relativity and quantum is another matter – one I can barely wrap my head around.)

Do you think our motivation to innovate is changing? If so, how will that affect the future (will our childrens’ “Revolutions� performance look very different)?

Not really – I think there has always been a mix of curiosity, altruism, commercial interest and hefty doses of ego (Newton was not a nice man.)

While that is true, part of the proposal of these shows is that we try to shift the weight towards curiosity and compassion – to integrate our understanding of progress and it’s causes with a world we would like our children (and ourselves) to live in.

We look back at history in order to move forward with more clarity and better questions than we had before. The potential to change is the reason we look for patterns and landmarks.

What will the next “Revolution� be?

I think MaRSians can answer that better than me. We’ve been marking a revolution at the point at which it had impact on a broad social level, so I imagine both nano and quantum technologies will make the transition into more day-to-day applications. One thing I’ve learned, though, is that predicting or pointing to the revolutions before or while they are happening is very difficult – probably for the same reason we don’t feel the earth spinning or see the ground under our feet.

What make the MaRS Centre a fitting space for this piece?

The context of innovation and collaboration is very exciting to me. Not only is this work about innovation, but also we are working in innovative and collaborative ways – experimenting and pushing the boundaries in a similar way to what I imagine those at MaRS do. It’s important to me that the link between science, technology and art not just be about content but also the innovation of form and ways of thinking about the world.

Also, I have a serious thing for white boards.

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