When physicists don’t see eye to eye

When Michael Frayn wrote Copenhagen, he could surely scarcely have imagined the interest it would generate and the furore it would cause. A play that consists almost entirely of erudite conversations between two eminent physicists (Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg) about the development of quantum theory and the moral responsibilities of nuclear scientists is not obviously a crowd-puller. And yet, five years after its première, the play is still being performed and is still the subject of hotly contested academic debates at conferences throughout the world. Apart from the concern of scientists and historians in getting the facts right about Heisenberg’s visit to Copenhagen in 1941, the interest roused by the play centres on the question of who is morally more culpable: those German scientists, like Heisenberg, who co-operated with the Nazi regime to the extent of taking part in the (failed) Nazi atomic bomb project or those allied scientists, like Bohr, who contributed to the success of the Manhattan Project, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians?

The genesis of John Cornwell’s stimulating, engaging and accessible new book lies in a symposium held at Jesus College, Cambridge (where Cornwell directs the Science and Human Dimension Project) in November 2002 to discuss Frayn’s play.