Day 63: Ongoing uncertainity

My nuclear repertoire expanded last night as we attended the Provincetown Players first performance of Michael Frayn's Copenhagen. The play is centered around the mysterious meeting in 1941 between physicists Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. Heisenberg had come from Germany during the height of the war to speak to Bohr at his home in Copenhagen- to give him an important message. The performance makes the uncertainty clear, not only of what history knows about this meeting, but what the two men actually remember happening as well. The play "starts" over and over as the men try to remember what was said, what was intended, what was misunderstood, what was known, and what was assumed about their meeting that night. It is left up to the audience to make sense of how all of these various versions of their meeting might have changed, or perhaps not changed at all, who knew what about nuclear weapons, when (crucially), and how this information might have been used- if at all- before the Americans did in 1945.

Learn more about Copenhagen.