Winner of:

Drama Desk Award for Best New Play

Evening Standard Award for Best Play

New York Drama Critics' Circle Best Play

Tony Award for Best Play

There is a new play by Michael Frayn, best known for his humorous writings, about the famous visit of Werner Heisenberg to Niels Bohr in Copenhagen in the autumn of 1941. Those who dismiss the work as likely to be yet another populist mishmash of half-understood physics, personality stereotyping and political mystery-mongering would be wrong. An enquiry into the events of a particular evening in Bohr's home becomes a wise and perfectly informed journey to the core of the scientific enterprise. It is also brilliant theatre. (Physics World.

Frayn's starting-point is the meeting in wartime Denmark between Niels Bohr, Europe's leading quantum theorist, and Werner Heisenberg, his ex-colleague working on the German atomic bomb project. What actually happened? Why was the meeting so brusquely aborted by Bohr? Was Heisenberg seeking information, absolution, endorsement? And why did Heisenberg fail to make the final calculation that would have enabled Germany to develop its own bomb? Out of the uncertainty Frayn builds a brilliant play - one that replays, from the vantage-point of eternity, the endless possibilities of this collision of human particles. Under the watchful eye of Bohr's wife, Margrethe, the two men re-live their encounter, searching for its meaning. (The Guardian)

"Part of the thrill of Frayn's play is reaching its end and feeling you've understood it. The dialogue is filled to bursting with names, dates and places, along with principles of quantum physics and nuclear fission." (Daryl H. Miller, The Los Angeles Times)

"An evening with Michael Frayn's dazzling new drama will be among the most exhilarating, challenging and involving two and a half hours you ever spend in a theater. And you don't need an advanced degree to understand the profound questions it raises about motive, morality and the betrayal of memory. They're at the very epicenter of the turbulent twentieth century from which we're just emerging, questions that take us straight to the heart of human existence." ( Carol Rocamora, The Nation)

Read more... about the history of the German Bomb, Heisenberg and Bohr

Historical Background...

A single lurid fear prompted the American decision to undertake the vast effort and expense required to build the atomic bomb: the fear that Hitler's Germany would do it first. In August, 1939, Einstein wrote a letter to President Roosevelt warning that the discovery of fission allowed for the development of "extremely powerful bombs of a new type, big enough to destroy a whole port together with some of the surrounding territory."

Einstein knew that Germany already had a six-month head start (nuclear fission had been discovered in Germany in December of 1938) and Europe's only uranium mines -- and the world's only 'heavy weater' plant -- were already under German control. But what worried Einstein most was that one of the world's greatest practicing physicists, Werner Heisenberg, after spending the summer in the US -- where he had received multiple offers from America's pre-eminent universities -- was on his way back to Berlin!

Einstein and his fellow scientists knew Heisenberg's genius. He had won a Nobel Prize in 1932 for his "uncertainty principle." and both Teller and Oppenheimer had studied under him. What they did not know, and could not fathom, were his intentions. The only clues to his thinking were two remarks he had made at a conference in Chicago during the summer of 1939.

In the first, he warned an American physicist that Germany was ready for war and had its sights set on the mastery of Europe; what, he inquired, would the Americans do if Germany invaded France? The American told Heisenberg that the US would go to the aid of France and Britain.

"Are you sure of this?" Heisenberg asked.

When the American said he was sure, Heisenberg urged him to persuade President Roosevelt to make a public statement to that effect. Heisenberg said he believed that the German General Staff, confident of victory in Europe, would think again if they knew the Americans would fight to stop them.

Heisneberg's second remark came a month later. Asked by Hans Bethe, another old student who had left Germany the year before, whether he thought the Germans would win the war, Heisenberg said yes: "I believe the Nazis will win."

Immediately following his return to Berlin, Heisenberg read an article in the American journal Physical Review by Neils Bohr -- his old teacher -- offering a theoretical proof that it was a rare isotope of uranium, U-235 which fissioned in samples of natural uranium bombarded with neutrons. The only question. Bohr wrote, was how to separate usable quantities of pure U-235 from natural uranium. Shortly thereafter Heisenberg was ordered to report to the Heereswaffenamt (Army Ordnance Research Department) to work on the problem of isolating U-235. Heisenberg's war had begun.

What happened in Copenhagen?

Volumes have been written about what happened between Bohr and Heisenberg in 1941 in Copenhagen (see Read More, below). Although they were very close friends before the war (Heisenberg was Bohr's pupil) they gave radically different accounts of the meeting in 1945. Heisenberg even went back in 1947 and attempted to find some common ground with Bohr, and Bohr wrote Heisenberg a letter in 1957 "correcting" Heisenberg's memory of the meeting. But they never reconciled their different interpretations and, according to Heisenberg, in his memoirs, "We both came to feel that it would be better to stop disturbing the spirits of the past."

Even more has been written about what Heisenberg was hoping to achieve by the meeting. Long after the war he tried, once more, to answer the question. "In the summer of 1939, twelve people might still have been able, by coming to mutual agreement, to prevent the construction of atomic bombs," he said. Did Heisenberg still think such a 'mutual agreement' was possible in 1941 when he went to see Neils Bohr in Copenhagen? Many people, Thomas Powers included, think so.

Michael Frayn is not so sure. "What people say about their own motives and intentions, even when they are not caught in the traps that entangled Heisenberg, is always subject to question -- as subject to question as what anyone else says about them. Thoughts and intentions, even one's own -- perhaps one's own most of all -- remain shifting and elusive." Frayn concludes: "Since, according to the 'Copenhagen Interpretation' of quantum mechanics... the whole possibility of saying or thinking about the world... depends upon human observation, and is subject to the limitations which the human mind imposes, this uncertainty in our thinking is also fundamental to the nature of the world." (From the Postscript to Copenhagen)DN