Encounter in Copenhagen Analysis/Commentary Here's the premise of Michael Frayn's play, Copenhagen (1998): in September 1941, two men meet in Copenhagen to discuss the future of the world. They are Werner Heisenberg, a German physicist and Nobel laureate working for the Nazis, and Niels Bohr, a Dane physicist of Jewish extraction and Nobel laureate, soon to be enlisted by the Allies. In the '20s, the scientists had worked together on developing the rules governing quantum mechanics, the behavior of elementary particles. Their procedures enabled colleagues to go beyond Einstein's theories and to calculate atomic collision and fission. These men formed the nodes, with Einstein, of the Germanic Erklarung (Enlightenment) of the early twentieth century. Niels Bohr was born in 1985 and received his doctorate in 1911. He established Copenhagen as a center for atomic research in the 1920s, and invited Werner Heisenberg, 15 years his junior, to come work with him. Together, the two physicists developed the mathematics of atomic motion, where phenomena resolve themselves at once as "waves" and "quanta" (particles). Heisenberg defined the rule of "indeterminacy" -- if a particle's velocity is known, its position cannot be determined, and vice-versa. Bohr described "complementarity" -- the time-energy, wave-quantum duality of atoms. But their fateful meeting, years later, turned out to be a Mexican standoff. Bohr was concerned that Heisenberg wanted to pick his brains, while Heisenberg was fearful that the Allies might possess both the manpower and industrial capability to create a bomb to drop on Germany. He was intent on an atomic truce. Like Sartre's No Exit, Copenhagen offers an artistic thought experiment that seeks to resolve in afterlife the problems of life. The play asks about the responsibility of scientists in the development of instruments of mass destruction. Clearly, the men themselves remain instruments in the hands of political interests who, sooner or later, will achieve their aims -- but do they have a choice in taking an active or passive dissenting role? Should they have guilt about creating doomsday machines? At least on a mental level, aren't genocide and progress being confused? And isn't justice simply the top dog's right to the meanest weapons? Copenhagen doesn't answer all these questions to satisfaction, but it does succeed in posing them intelligently. The world, while still too young for wisdom and morality, at least begins to grow tired of barbarity. April 26, 2001