Flat Earth Theatre Presents Copenhagen

Copenhagen tells a story that’s as old as science: an argument about who knew what when. Werner Heisenberg spent World War II working to uncover the secrets of nuclear energy - secrets that would certainly have led eventually to nuclear weapons - for Adolph Hitler and the Nazis. Did Heisenberg know enough about fission in 1941 to have suggested the possibility of building a bomb to his old friend Bohr? Or did the use of nuclear weapons at the end of the war catch him completely by surprise? Was he a hero who held back his knowledge at great personal cost to keep the atom bomb out of Nazi hands? Or was he simply laboring under faulty assumptions and bad math throughout the war?

These kinds of disputes are practically commonplace in science. Witness the famous debate over who invented calculus: the English Newton, or the German Leibntiz? In Arcadia, Tom Stoppard’s famous play of literature, history and science in equal measure, Valentine dismisses the questions as “trivial.” Newton and Leibnitz - or Heisenberg and Bohr - might respond that it’s hardly trivial to them. In Heisenberg’s case, however, it’s hardly trivial by any standard, because the stakes were so incredibly high.

By the end of the war, the American’s Manhattan Project had created the world’s first nuclear weapon, and changed the course of history - and the nature of warfare - forever. Thankfully, nuclear weapons have never been used since US forces bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945, and hopefully they will never be used again. If the German nuclear program, headed by Heisenberg, had succeeded, these weapons might have first appeared in the hands of a genocidal dictator.

Learn more about the terrible stakes underlying Copenhagen. Find out more about the science behind atom bombs here and the first use of these horrible weapons here. PLEASE NOTE, this second link leads to a page with some troubling and graphic images.

Copenhagen runs January 6-14 at the Factory Theatre. Reserve your tickets today.

In Copenhagen, Werner Heisenberg and Niels and Margrethe Bohr struggle to truly understand the causes and effects of a very simple set of actions - one conversation that took place in 1941. The task proves more difficult than they expect, but to help, all three call upon their experience in understanding something every bit as obscure and seemingly unknowable as the human heart: the secrets hidden inside atoms.

By and large, most people think of the physical world as a place of certainty. The things you can see, the things you can touch and feel, are definite, solid, real. Our perceptions can be flawed, but the world is what it is regardless of how we perceive it. But at the quantum level - past cellular biology and chemical reactions, down inside of atoms - things are rarely so clear.

Werner Heisenberg’s famous Uncertainty Principle and Niels Bohr’s notion of complementarity were realizations about the limits of what we can understand on the quantum level. Uncertainty states that, at the sub-atomic level, information is a zero-sum game, and the more you know about one aspect of a system - say, momentum - the less you know about another - say, position. Complementarity calls into question our ability to understand the basic nature of such strange, tiny objects as electrons or photons. Measured one way, light clearly behaves as a stream of particles, small material objects; measured another, it cannot possibly be a particle and instead behaves like a wave, a pattern of energy. The image of the wave - first proposed by Heisenberg’s sometimes rival Schrodinger, of the famous thought experiment - is crucial to our understanding of how sub-atomic particles behave. An electron can’t be described as a point; instead, it must be described as a series of possible points, like a graph of a sine wave.

These ideas, and the incredibly tricky problem of interpreting them, are even now very much at the forefront of the study of the sub-atomic universe. Bohr and Heisenberg would have said that Uncertainty and Complementarity were tools for describing the way we understand quantum mechanics, that the image of the wave was a system laying out everything we can know. This became known as the Copenhagen Interpretation.

The other school of thought - that sub-atomic particles are in some way literally waves - is still alive and kicking. Just last month a preview of new paper was published arguing, with “seismic” consequences for  modern physics, against the most up-to-date version of the Copenhagen Interpretation. Learn more about this new discovery, and then learn more about the men who started it all in Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen.

Our thanks to Lisa Grossman for alerting us to the article in Nature!

Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg were two of the greatest scientists of the 20th century. Working together, they formulated the central concepts of quantum mechanics. The two men were not only partners; they were also the best of friends. But in 1941, at their charged meeting in Copenhagen - the subject of Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen - World War II was at its height, and history had come between the Danish Bohr and the German Heisenberg.

In 1941, Denmark had been occupied by German forces for more than a year. The occupation had been largely peaceful, and by surrendering Denmark had mostly been able to protect its Jewish citizens - including Bohr, whose mother was Jewish. Nonetheless, tension and mistrust were in the air, and both men felt it.

Two years later, in 1943, that tension exploded. The Germans cracked down on Denmark, and planned a mass deportation of all Jewish Danes to concentration camps. Due to the actions of Danish citizens and the assistance of German officials with doubts about the deportations (such as Georg Duckwitz), almost every Jewish Dane was safely evacuated by sea to neutral Sweden, practically overnight - including Bohr, who went on to join the historic Manhattan Project.

Learn more about the incredible true story behind Copenhagen, and then see that story told through the “scintillating” and “endlessly fascinating” lens of Michael Frayn’s Tony-award winning play.

Copenhagen runs January 6-14 at the Factory Theatre. Reserve your tickets today.