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Title: Copenhagen by Michael Frayn ISBN: 0-385-72079-3 Publisher: Anchor Books/Doubleday Pub. Date: 08 August, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.36 (25 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A Brilliant Exploration of the Uncertainty of Human Motives
Comment: In September, 1941, Werner Heisenberg, then leading Nazi Germany's war-time effort to exploit the uses of nuclear fission, made a trip to Copenhagen to visit his former mentor, the brillant Danish physicist Niels Bohr. Together, in the 1920s, Bohr and Heisenberg had been instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics, complementarity and the uncertainty principle, concepts which provided the theoretical underpinning for modern nuclear physics and, ultimately, the atomic bomb. Hence, the reason for Heisenberg's visit to Bohr, and what Heisenberg and Bohr discussed during that visit, has been the subject of much historical speculation. It is this event which forms the basis for Michael Frayn's thought-provoking play of ideas, "Copenhagen".
Heisenberg's role in Germany's effort to develop atomic weapons has been the topic of much speculation, historians tending to place him on one side or the other of the moral dividing line. There are those who paint him as an evil tool of the Nazis, someone who willingly devoted himself to Germany's scientific efforts to develop an atomic weapon. From their perspective, there has been a tendency to read Heisenberg's 1941 visit to Bohr as an effort to recruit Bohr to the German scientific fold. There are others who see the visit as more enigmatic, who do not ascribe such clear intentions to Heisenberg, and who see in the historical record evidence that Heisenberg was a passive opponent of the Nazis' objectives, a scientist who quietly undermined the German scientific effort while ostenbibly remaining a "good" German.
Frayn brilliantly depicts the uncertainty of Heisenberg's motivations, as well as the uncertainty of what occurred at the meeting between the two scientists, using the theory of these physicists to illumine not the physical world, but the psychological world of human motives. "Uncertainty" thus describes not merely the behavior of the atom, but also the behavior of individuals living in ethically difficult historical circumstances. As Frayn notes in his Postscript to the text of this play, "thoughts and intentions, even one's own-perhaps one's own most of all-remain shifting and elusive. There is not one single thought or intention of any sort that can ever be precisely established."
"Copenhagen" is lucidly and sparely written, a play of dialogue among only three characters-Heisenberg, Bohr and Bohr's wife, Margrethe. There are, of course, numerous references to the esoteric world of theoretical physics, particularly as it developed in the 1920s, and the Postscript to the text is therefore especially helpful in understanding both the scientific and historical frames of reference for the play.
Read this little play-better yet, see it if you can-because "Copenhagen" is a dramatic work that truly deserves to be recognized as one of outstanding plays of recent years.
Rating: 5
Summary: Copehagen:Theoretical Physics Packs with Human Drama
Comment: 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!
Rating: 5
Summary: The play and a fascinating postscript
Comment: This book contains the text of Michael Frayn's Tony Award-winning play (94 pages), a fascinating 38-page Postscript, and a two-page word sketch of the scientific and historical background to the play.
The play itself is brilliant (see my review of the PBS production directed by Howard Davies, starring Stephen Rea, Daniel Craig, and Francesca Annis available on DVD) and is the kind of play that can be fully appreciated simply by reading it. There are no stage directions, no mention of props or stage business. There is simply Frayn's extraordinary dialogue. A photo from the cover suggests how the play might be staged on a round table with the three characters, Danish physicist Niels Bohr, his wife Margrethe, and German physicist Werner Heisenberg, going slowly round and round as in an atom. This symbolism is intrinsic to the ideas of the play with Bohr seen as the stolid proton at the center and the younger Heisenberg the flighty electron that "circles." Margrethe who brings both common sense and objectivity to the interactions between the ever circling physicists, might be thought of as a neutron, or perhaps she is the photon that illuminates (and deflects ever so slightly) what it touches.
At the center of the play (and at the center of our understanding of the world through quantum mechanics) is a fundamental uncertainty. While Heisenberg and Bohr demonstrated to the world through the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics that there will always be something we cannot in principle know regardless of how fine our measurements, Frayn's play suggests that there will always be some uncertainty about what went on between the two great architects of QM during Heisenberg's celebrated and fateful visit to the Bohr household in occupied Denmark in 1941. There is uncertainty at the heart of not only our historical tools but at the very heart of human memory (as Frayn explains in the Postscript).
"The great challenge facing the storyteller and the historian alike is to get inside people's heads... Even when all the external evidence has been mastered, the only way into the protagonists' heads is through the imagination. This indeed is the substance of the play." (p. 97)
The three characters appear as ghosts of their former selves, as it were, and begin immediately an attempt to unravel and understand what happened in 1941. The central question is Why did Heisenberg come to Copenhagen? Was it an attempt to enlist Bohr in a German atomic bomb project? Was it to get information from Bohr about an Allied project or to pick his brain for ideas on how to make fission work? Or was it, as Margrethe avers, to "show himself off"--the little boy grown up, the man who was once part of a defeated country, now triumphant?
The play leaves it for us to find an answer, because neither history nor the recorded words of the participants give us anything close to certainty. With the conflicting statements of the characters Frayn implies that the truth may be a matter of one's point of view, that is, it may be a question of relativity. Ultimately it may even be that Heisenberg himself did not know why he came to Copenhagen.
Also being asked by Frayn's play is a moral question. Is it right for scientists to build weapons of mass destruction to be used on civilian targets? Heisenberg contends that this is the question he wanted to ask of Bohr. It is ironic that although Heisenberg was condemned by physicists around the world for his (presumed) unsuccessful attempt to build a fission bomb for Hitler, his work killed no one, while the universally beloved and admired Bohr had a hand in the Manhattan project that resulted in the bombs that were dropped on the Japanese cities.
As the electron is seen and then not seen, its speed measured and then not measured, but never both at the same time, so it is with Heisenberg's character in life and in this play. We are never sure where he is. Is he working for the Nazis or is he only pretending to? Is he working on a reactor or is he working on a bomb? Did he delay the German project intentionally (as he claimed), or was the failure due to incompetence, or even--as Frayn suggests--to an unconscious quirk of Heisenberg's mind?
In the Postscript Frayn recalls the historical evidence he used in constructing the play and cites his sources and gives us insights into what Bohr and Heisenberg were like. He quotes Max Born, describing Heisenberg as having an "unbelievable quickness and precision of understanding," while "the most characteristic property" of Bohr, as described by George Gamow, "was the slowness of his thinking and comprehension." One can see where Frayn got his metaphor of the atom with its heavy nucleus and its speedy electron. But Bohr was also thoughtful and thorough while Heisenberg was "careless with numbers." And of course these are relative terms since both men were Nobel Prize-winning physicists, brilliant men who reached the very pinnacle of their profession.
Bottom line: one the great plays of our time on an epochal subject, fascinating and cathartic as all great plays should be.
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Title: Proof: A Play by David Auburn ISBN: 0571199976 Publisher: Faber & Faber Pub. Date: 01 March, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title:Copenhagen (PBS Hollywood Presents) ASIN: B00008RGZG Publisher: Image Entertainment Pub. Date: 13 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.99 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $22.49 |
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Title: Arcadia by Tom Stoppard ISBN: 0571169341 Publisher: Faber & Faber Pub. Date: 01 September, 1994 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Copenhagen Papers: An Intrigue by Michael Frayn, David Burke ISBN: 0312421249 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 01 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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Title: Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb by Thomas Powers ISBN: 0306810115 Publisher: Da Capo Press Pub. Date: 01 August, 2000 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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