'Copenhagen' captures atomic age excitement

Photo of David Perlman

"My dear Heisenberg!"

"My dear Bohr!"

Thus, in Michael Frayn's endlessly fascinating and circular drama "Copenhagen," now at the Curran, do the spirits of Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr greet each other as they are about to recall once again the heady days when atomic physics was in an extraordinary period of ferment and discovery.

History was being made during the '20s and '30s; Bohr had developed his new model of the atom with its orbiting electrons, he was refining quantum theory, proposing complementarity; light was suddenly both waves and particles.

His Nobel Prize came in 1922 for his revolutionary picture of the atom and its radiation.

Heisenberg, Bohr's dearest student, had come forward with his uncertainty principle, explaining why it would be forever impossible to determine simultaneously both the position and the momentum of any fleeting subatomic particle.

Sixteen years younger than his mentor, Heisenberg's Nobel Prize for discoveries in quantum mechanics came just 10 years after Bohr's.

The era was truly revolutionary:

Wolfgang Pauli, another of Bohr's prodigies, was to win the Nobel in 1945 for his "exclusion principle" controlling the behavior of spinning electrons. Einstein had already won his own Nobel in 1921 and was seeking a unified theory to link gravity with electromagnetism; Max Born, who hammered out the mathematics of quantum mechanics, would win his Nobel belatedly in 1954. Otto Frisch and his niece, Lise Meitner, caused uranium to fission, and that discovery ultimately led Bohr to Los Alamos.

The atom bomb was born there, and an age of innocence ended.

All those people and events -- seen in the play only in recollections by Bohr and Heisenberg at times joyous but often sad -- animate the vivid dialogue of "Copenhagen." They underlie the tensions as well as the affection that the characters display as Frayn brings his protagonists back to life and creates Margrethe Bohr as a wise, insightful and at times cynical observer.

In fact that's the way it must have been in the days when the world of physics was so filled with excited talk and each new physics meeting offered fresh reports of discoveries and fresh speculations.

Nor is the world of physics so different today, although there is as yet no parallel to the real-life mystery of Heisenberg's motives in his strange 1941 visit to Copenhagen that provides the drama of the Frayn play.

Physics today no longer focuses on the atom but rather on the infinitely smaller and the infinitely larger; yet scientists still seek what Einstein vainly sought until the end of his life: a "theory of everything" that would unify general relativity and quantum theory and that may at last create a new and valid Standard Model of the universe.

So physicists and their giant accelerators focus on quarks and gluons, the fundamental particles of matter, and on all the other elusive particles that J.

Robert Oppenheimer once called the "sub-nuclear zoo."

Others, with tools like the Hubble Telescope in space, the Keck in Hawaii and supercomputers in their laboratories, focus on the vast, unfathomable cosmos itself. They ask what has come after the Big Bang that gave birth to us all some 14 billion years or so ago, and they create new visions of an "inflationary universe" whose galaxies (including our own) are rushing away from one another ever faster and faster -- perhaps toward an ultimate emptiness trillions of years from now.

In Bohr's and Heisenberg's time, profound and tantalizing mysteries lay inside the atom, and physicists revelled in debate over quantum and relativity theories to explain what was going on.

So too there are new mysteries today to animate physicists and astronomers and cosmologists:

What is the "dark matter" that might explain why the universe seems to have so much more mass than all the stars and galaxies put together?

Can neutrinos, so ghostly and immaterial that they fly through a billion tons of lead without disturbing a single atom, actually hold the universe's missing mass?

What is the "dark energy" that seems to carry a repulsive force, overcoming the gravity of the missing mass and speeding the galaxies apart more and more rapidly? What are the strings or superstrings or "branes" that might explain all the forces and all the nine other universes that may exist besides our own.

"Copenhagen" is a play, and its drama lies in human conflict and unanswered questions. But its background lies in the ferment of discovery, and new ones just as tantalizing exist in science today. As Sir Martin Rees, the British cosmologist, has said of today's ferment after nearly 40 years of research:

"Now what's been exhilarating is that the rate of discoveries has not diminished." Bohr and Heisenberg could have said the same.