Second Presentation

Morality and science is a never ending issue. Along with progress comes a deeper discussion of ethics surrounding the issue. Nuclear bombs yielding the power to exterminate the human race in a matter a seconds pushes the ethics of science to a breaking point. Morality is not absent from Copenhagen, in fact, it is one of the central issues surrounding the wartime meeting between Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr. One possible reason why Heisenberg went to Copenhagen in the first place was to ask Bohr if a scientist had the moral right to work on a nuclear a bomb. There are no absolutes about the controversial meeting during that September night in Copenhagen. The only certainty is that the meeting took place. What was said, and the reasons for the visit are still as bleak as they were fifty years ago. This aspect of Fryan’s play proves to be the most interesting. How is it that we know what we know?
Werner Heisenberg states in the beginning of Act One, “Everyone understands uncertainty. Or thinks he does. No one understands my trip to Copenhagen…the more I’ve explained, the deeper the uncertainty has become” (4). Uncertainty is at the core of the play and Heisenberg’s actual life. His own principle of uncertainty asserted that the more precisely one measures one variable, the less precise the measurement of the second variable may be. (98) Bohr’s idea of complementarity says that light might be either a wave or a photon depending on perception. History is deeply rooted in these ideas of uncertainty and complementarity. How we know what we know is not as concrete as one thinks. In Copenhagen, Bohr asserts that, “Particles are things, complete in themselves. Waves are disturbances in something else. We must choose one of the two ways of seeing, but as soon as we do we can’t know everything about them.” Historians have spent countless hours examining documents, reading transcripts, and conducting interviews attempting to reach hard facts. Just like the principle of uncertainty history involves multiple variables, and like the idea of complementarity history can be viewed differently through different eyes, making it hard to know the full scale of information. People might not have been truthful in interviews, historians may interpret documents completely differently, and previously unreleased evidence may surface. Overtime facts can become distorted and skewed, loosing substance after each generation. What starts out as clear and concise may become garbled and foreign over time like a game of telephone.
As historians we are certain of some things, but these certainties do not always lead to absolutes. It is near impossible to be sure of things we believe are true because just like Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty there are too many variables to focus on at once. This is what caused Max Born to call Heisenberg and Bohr’s story not so much “a straight staircase upwards, but a tangle of interconnected alleys” (96). Frayn’s attempt to look down each one of the alleys yields bigger questions than simply why Heisenberg went to Copenhagen. Manifestly, Copenhagen is a play that tries to uncover truths about a little known meeting between two of the worlds greatest physicists during the Second World War. On a bigger scale Copenhagen raises questions surrounding historical certainty and morality in science. As a work of fiction Copenhagen attempts to fuse historical records about a fuzzy subject and speculate further what might have happened on that September night in Copenhagen, 1941.