Join us for an evening at the theater! Central Square Theater is presenting the award-winning psychological mystery, Copenhagen, which "unravels what transpired" at the meeting of two brilliant physicists, Werner Heisenberg and Neils Bohr, who were fast friends but from enemy nations at the onset of World War II. Following the performance, we will host a talk-back with a guest discussant.  

The first 30 MIT Community members to RSVP to radius@mit.edu will be our guests!

Below is an excerpt from the Institute for Historical Review discussing the play.  The review is by Daniel A. Michaels.

Peter Frayn's play Copenhagen, recently returned to the stage in America, speculates on what might have transpired during a meeting between Nobel laureates Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in Copenhagen in September 1941, at the height of the German advance into Russia and just three months before America's entry into the war. The power of National Socialist Germany was at its pinnacle, and the Germans had just been made aware, through Swedish sources, of U.S. plans to build an atomic bomb.

The meeting was at Heisenberg's behest. As Germany's leading theoretical physicist and head of the German Uranium Club, the organ which would assess the possible war uses of nuclear energy, he was the man best situated to advise his government on the creation of an atomic bomb. The older Bohr was not only a professional colleague of Heisenberg, but a close personal friend as well. The play ponders the possible reasons for Heisenberg's visit, linking them to the failure of the Germans to develop the bomb.

The action of the play encompasses the initial meeting of the two physicists in Copenhagen in 1941, another encounter in 1947, and finally an imagined meeting that takes place after all three characters have died. Margrethe, Bohr's wife, is present in all scenes as interlocutor and commentator. Even after death they are unable to ascertain with certainty (thus, the uncertainty principle in human life) precisely what was said in Copenhagen in 1941, what was implied, and what was inferred. Did Bohr understand what Heisenberg intended to convey? Did Bohr misinform -- intentionally or unwittingly -- the Western Allies of Germany's wartime plans?