Unraveling the Drama of Science
1 May 2002

It's been several years since British playwright Michael Frayn wrote Copenhagen, about the September 1941 meeting between the Danish physicist Niels Bohr and his German counterpart Werner Heisenberg.

Littered with obscure references to Uranium 235 and the cyclotron, the playwright doubted whether the work would even get an audience, much less engender heated debate. "When I started writing the play, I didn't think anyone would actually come and see it," said Frayn, speaking recently at a symposium on Theater, Science and History in Copenhagen at Berkeley, California.

Yet people are still talking about Copenhagen, which won the Tony Award for Best Play in 2000. It doesn't even seem to matter that the playwright doesn't know anything about physics.

From Bertolt Brecht and Friedrich DŸrrenmatt to Steven Poliakoff and Tom Stoppard, science has proven an enduring theme for playwrights. While writers generally don't know much about science, sometimes their dramatic reconstructions of scientific endeavor can impact the science establishment in ways they never envisaged.

For Frayn, as for many other playwrights, science only serves as a metaphor for exploring a broader philosophical concept. In the case of Copenhagen, science is a vehicle to discover, as Frayn described it, "whether it's possible to know what peoples' intentions are."

But the play did more than that. It fanned the flames of a smoldering debate among science historians about the events surrounding the invention of the atomic bomb.

Before World War II, Heisenberg and Bohr transformed atomic physics, together with their work on quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle in the 1920s. Nobody knows why Heisenberg made the trip to Nazi-occupied Copenhagen in September 1941 to visit his friend and mentor Bohr, or what the two men said to each other.

Whether Heisenberg was attempting to weasel information out of Bohr about Allied bomb plans or stall the development of atomic weapons back home has become the subject of several books, including Thomas Powers Heisenberg's War and Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project: A Study In German Culture, by Paul Lawrence Rose.

More recently, and as a direct result of Copenhagen, the dispute spilled over into the pages of the New York Review of Books and the Los Angeles Times, as well as at numerous international symposia, where critics continue the discussion.

In February, the Niels Bohr archive in Denmark decided to lift an embargo on an important letter to Heisenberg by Bohr relating to their 1941 meeting. In the letter, Bohr accuses Heisenberg of misleading others in the aftermath of World War II by claiming to have purposefully undermined the German atom bomb effort. Written around 1957, Bohr claims that in his recollection of their encounter, Heisenberg seemed less ambivalent about building a bomb than he later implied.

The letter was never sent. Hidden from view after Bohr's death in 1962, scientists, historians and artists speculated about its contents for years. Scheduled for release in 2012, the letter was recently published on the Internet, "in order to accommodate the present interest spurred in particular by the drama Copenhagen and to avoid undue speculation," said Finn Aaserud, of the Niels Bohr Archive.

"The play has caused the history of science to change," said Professor Robert Osserman, of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley. "Copenhagen forced the archive to release those documents early, which has helped to reduce speculation."

Theater has become a particularly popular way of putting science into the public imagination, with plays like David Auburn's Proof, Steven Poliakoff's Blinded by the Sun, Tom Stoppard's Arcadia and Peter Parnell's QED attracting wide audiences and public response.

The extent to which people are engaging with these dramas is mirrored by the fact that these plays have been the subjects of many symposia.

"No medium can better convey the immediacy of emotions," said professor Robert Marc Friedman, a science historian at the University of Oslo, Norway, "and science, after all, entails not only cold logic, but also cauldrons of hot passion."

While it's true that an able playwright doesn't need a PhD in relativity in order to write a powerful play about Einstein, science historians are sometimes troubled by artistic reconstructions of science. Friedman believes that taking too many dramatic liberties with a character in a play can damage the integrity of the historical figure.

"When a playwright breathes life into a name from history and creates a seemingly real person who is as new for the audience as any fictional character, there should be some sense of responsibility for how that person is portrayed," Friedman said.

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