A terrible distortion occurs because of its absence. There was, in the midst of all this dazzling talk, a missing subject. I steamed and fumed and quarreled with the play into the early hours of the morning, tossing in my bed, agitated as any person with an unrequited argument can be. There is, however, something grim that hangs on after the curtain goes down. We sit in the theater admiring, wondering-as the very same science that we now know is tainted by our human souls, corrupted by our incurable affinity for evil, struts its stuff stunningly on the stage. It also shows science in all its splendor, science as pure as human reason, science breathtakingly beautiful, the way it was before we knew that scientific discoveries could lead to vile acts, that gas chambers and A-bombs were just as much the fruit of science as antibiotics and black hole theory. It takes us right to that raw uncomfortable place at the heart of our human survival against demons like fission and demons like Hitler.
The play is rational, probing, intellectually relentless.
“How?” The play encourages us to imagine. His life, too, could be described as an uncertainty principle. Heisenberg-mercurial, lightning fast- uncovered the uncertainty principle in physics. Our ability to know exactly what their motives were, and how they played against the pressures of the time, is limited. Did Werner Heisenberg, one evening in 1941, ask Niels Bohr if it was a moral thing to build a bomb for Hitler, to build a bomb at all? What was the relationship of the two men, and what of their rivalry, of their friendship? How close did we come to Hitler’s owning the tool to destroy the world? Did Heisenberg sabotage the Nazi effort or did he fail by simple careless miscalculation? Did he protect Bohr or betray him? The science of the two men is reflected in their moral choices. No doubt the play Copenhagen, by Michael Frayn, is brilliant.
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