Head of Public Understanding of Science and Technology for the Sloan Foundation, Doron Weber grants funds to filmmakers and playwrights covering science-centric issues, including productions such as Broadway’s upcoming “Constellations.”
What is the Sloan Foundation’s goal?The true aim would be to see the world like Leonardo da Vinci; [art and science are] not two cultures, it’s one. That’s an ambitious goal, but we’re shooting to bring them back into a dialogue and also try to restore their coherence so you can see things with multiple points of depth…so when you hear technical jargon, your brain doesn’t check out. As our culture and society are scientific and psychological, we need to be able to understand and talk about things with a certain degree of complexity.
What’s a show the foundation has funded?“Constellations” received a production grant and is going up in January, starring Jake Gyllenhaal. One of the two characters, the woman, is a quantum theorist and a professor—[that storyline] fulfills our criteria. What’s also beautiful about the play is that [playwright Nick Payne] structures it with a many-worlds theory, fracturing time with
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