Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen!
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I think the book is wonderful - though I have only read it, never seen a performance. I suppose I have two unfair advantages in reading this book. Firstly I am reading, not watching, so I can turn back and go over difficult points again thus making better sense of them. Secondly I am a physicist (though very rusty nowadays), and I have a certain love for Quantum Theory engendered by Feynman's big red book.
I can see that without these two advantages the play might be less attractive. It can't be a total turn off, though, because the play was recommended to me by a non-scientific friend who saw it in London and was very much enthralled by it.
So it may be worth a non-scientist giving it a try.
For me, the book is better than the play for a third reason: it includes a wonderful postscript exhibiting the great forensic skill that Frayn used to write the play. What may annoy some people is that the book (or play) require hard work of the reader (or audience) and still end up raising many more questions than answers. But the questions are explored with great thoroughness, and the main characters are treated so honestly, and yet tenderly.
For me the effort required was well worth it.
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Fantastic to watch on stage
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I already knew the scientific background and the theory, before I went to see the play in London, not having read the book. It was a fantastic experience, and it was afterwards that I bought the book of the play, so that I could recall those special scenes.
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An unsolved mystery!
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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.
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As you know, Werner
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I've read the book, and I saw the play this evening. Neither impressed me, despite the undoubted accuracy of the historical and technical background (I'm a science writer). This is poor theatre, full of "As you know, Bob" conversations (i.e. where two characters repeat for our benefit what they both already know); concepts from atomic physics, particularly Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, used as inaccurate metaphors for human interactions; and plain authorial waffle.
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A tour de force!
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This play is a magnificent achievement but to appreciate it fully my advice is to read the book first for maximum understanding and enjoyment.
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