Copenhagen [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

You might not guess it from the title, but this is the play by Michael Frayn that for several years attracted full house at Broadway and at theaters in London. Background: The atomic bomb was built in Los Alamos during WW II by American scientists, and it signaled in 1945 the start of what we now call the Cold War. But it also ended WW II. Parallel to Los Alamos, German scientists in Leipzig worked on building a nuclear reactor, and the bright young Werner Heisenberg was an undisputed leader of the German fission project. However the science itself originated in Europe. The play has three characters, Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, and Margrethe Bohr, and the location is the private home of the Bohrs. The book and the play paint a compelling picture of the three. When I went to the play in London, the audience sat in stitches for the whole two hours. I didn't see anyone dozing off, not even during the technical parts of the play. And they most certainly weren't just scientists. Much has been written about the other early atomic scientists, not directly part of the play, e.g., Lise Meitner, Otto Hahn, and Fritz Strassman, to mention just a few. During WW II, in the Fall of 1941, while Denmark was under Nazi occupation, Werner Heisenberg traveled from Leipzig to Copenhagen to see his mentor Niels Bohr. WH had just been 25 years old when he did the work for which he won the Nobel Prize, and in WH's early career, Bohr had become a father figure to the boyish and insecure Werner Heisenberg. The much younger WH was 40 when he visited the Bohrs. Michael Frayn imagines that the three, the Bohrs and Werner Heisenberg meet in after-life to re-live the fateful 1941 encounter, and to resolve WH's motives for his Copenhagen visit; a visit that clearly ended a long and deep friendship. The Bohrs viewed it as a hostile visit, and that never changed, even though Bohr never spoke about what was said in 1941; not then and not later. WH had chosen to stay in Germany after the War broke out in 1939. Why? Did, or did he not, work on the bomb for Hitler? While we may never know the answer, the play offers five possible answers, and we must choose for ourselves. The story really begins before 1941 with the foundation of quantum mechanics in the 1920ties. WH's first paper in Z Physik (1925) is a scientific and a historical mile stone, and it is thought to be the beginning of quantum theory. It is from there we have the ubiquitous notion of 'uncertainty' (of simultaneous quantum observations of position and momentum.) The papers of the three giants Heisenberg, Schrodinger, and Dirac in the 1920ties made precise the theory and the variables: states, observables, probabilities, the uncertainty principle, dual variables, and the equations of motion. This was also when the wave-particle question received a more precise mathematical formulation, and resolution. Perhaps best known are the equation of Schrodinger, giving the dynamics of systems of quantum mechanical particles, and Dirac's equation for the electron. All three of the pioneers won the Nobel Prize at a young age;-- Schrodinger was a little older than the other two (Heisenberg and Dirac were both born in 1902.) Many of the young physicists spent time in Copenhagen in the period between the wars, and Bohr was a mentor to them, and to WH he was perhaps even a father figure. Comment: In 1932, John von Neumann who had just settled in the US showed, surprisingly at the time, that Schrodinger's formulation is equivalent to Heisenbergs matrix mechanics, and von Neumann turned quantization into a field of mathematics. After WWII, Heisenberg resumed his work on the theoretical aspects of quantum fields and other areas of mathematical physics, and he was active as a scientific advisor to post war German government officials. He also wrote books of a more philosophical bent. However they do not settle the question from Copenhagen 1941.
Reviewed by Palle Jorgensen, August 2003.

Just saw Copenhagen on Broadway. I found it one of the most interesting evenings I have ever spent at the theater. Three people on the stage for 2.5 hours, discussing physics and personal issues sounds hard to take. Nevertheless, the experience was exhilarating, much like a Stoppard drama.

HOWEVER, the discussion can be difficult to follow at times, not just because of the science, of course, but also because the author covers a lot of the politics of 1920s physics and 1930s Europolitics. After a couple of hours. I wished that I had read the play before seeing it. I recommend that you consider doing the same. (Don't worry: You won't lose any of the "plot" line by reading ahead. In fact, a readahead may make the interchanges seems richer....)

Who would think that a play about two theoretical physicists, Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr would pack such dramatic interest for people with little background in nuclear physics? Yet Michael Frayn's Copenhagen provides both the human drama of the scientists involved in the nuclear weapons race between Nazi Germany and the Allied Forces ,and the ironic parallels between the Principle of Uncertainty in physics developed by these scientists and the unpredictability of outcomes involving human variables in their own lives. My rather "dry " summary of the content of this play, however, does not begin to convey the drama, irony and humour in the play . Three characters, Heisenberg, Bohr and his wife Margrethe met once again after their death to try to understand Heisenberg's "real " reason for his strange visit to Bohr in 1941 in occupied Copenhagen while Heisenberg was heading the German nuclear reactor program. Through the recollection of each from their points of view about the events of the past, the play reveals the personal and professional relationship between the two scientists and others in the elite scientifc community. The dialog is fast moving, sparkles with humor and dazzling description of the mind games of the brilliant and ideosycratic group of scientists. But in these exchanges between the characters, one understands how important and potentially deadly these "games" and the players can be for humanity. With the three perspectives of the same events provided by the three characters, the play reveals mulitple motives and meanings that conclude in the abrupt termination of the meeting between Heisenberg and Bohr in 1941 that might have been the reason that the Nazis failed to develop an atom bomb before the Allied Forces! Or maybe a lost opportunity for deterring the development of nuclear weapons by either side? In two acts, one is absorbed by the levels of relationship between the characters, the irony of academic brilliance and real life failures, the dilemma of pursuit of scientifc 'truth' and responsibility to humanity. Along with all these heady issues, however, ones gains enough knowledge of nuclear physics to see the parallel in the human drama of these scientists in their personal lives. This play is trully a heady trip that makes one want to slow down the racing of ideas in the dialog by going back to catch the multiple meanings one missed in the first reading. It makes one continue to post "what if's" about the development of nuclear weapon and the possible human histories of our lifetime. I saw the play in London before reading the book, but find the book to be a even more satisfying experience. Don't miss it!