A play about quantum mechanics. Such a premise sounds like a recipe for disaster and yet the Toronto revival of Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, currently playing at the Winter Garden Theatre, has been drawing superb reviews and sold-out houses. Why the sudden interest in theoretical physics?
Actually, the popular interest in the play is probably less in the science than in the philosophical and ethical questions raised by the source material. Copenhagen is a fictionalization of the September, 1941 visit to the Dutch city (then under Nazi occupation) by German physicist Werner Heisenberg, in order to see his friend and mentor Niels Bohr. Heisenberg and Bohr were two of the most brilliant physicists of their time, developing together the 1927 Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, and each winning the Nobel Prize at various times in their careers.
What information was exchanged between Bohr and Heisenberg in that tension-filled wartime visit continues to be debated. The historical record shows, however, that the 1941 meeting destroyed Bohr and Heisenberg’s friendship, and this was possibly a result of Heisenberg informing Bohr of the German plans for atomic weapons. Germany was ultimately unsuccessful in building the bomb, which led to a great deal of speculation about whether Heisenberg deliberately sabotaged the effort for ethical reasons, as he later claimed, and if so, whether it was a result of his meeting with Bohr.
It is out of this collision between ethical and scientific interests that Frayn brilliantly fictionalizes the 1941 meeting between the two physicists and seeks an answer to the question of why Heisenberg initiated the meeting in the first place, at great personal danger. Was it because Heisenberg had moral and ethical qualms about “arming a homicidal maniac with a nuclear bomb”? Did this same ethical dilemma lead Heisenberg to stall the nuclear program? Or was the failure of the German effort merely due to technical difficulties, with Heisenberg having cast aside all such ethical doubts?
These questions and many others will likely never be resolved for certain; indeed, Frayn uses Heisenberg’s own Uncertainty Principle (which states that one cannot simultaneously measure the position and momentum of a particle to arbitrary precision) as a metaphorical device to argue that the more we seek the answers to such questions about science and ethics, the less we ultimately find that we know. The application of scientific theorems to real life is always perilous but in the words of Heisenberg himself, in this case, “it just works”.
As does the play as a whole. Flawless performances by all of the three actors: Michael Ball as Bohr, the esteemed Martha Henry as his wife Margrethe, and Jim Mezon as Heisenberg, make for a very believable and intense performance. One leaves the theatre intellectually stimulated but drained. Perhaps top-notch art is not so different from cutting-edge physics after all.
