An evening well spent, in the company of my better half and and more than half a dozen physicists (or at least vocally pronounced) is how a concise sentence would describe our evening. For descriptive insight, read on.
Surfing through the morning newspaper I chanced upon a section in the entertainment supplement, which lists down events, plays and similar reasons to plan a nice evening. Copenhegan, written in bold, quite stood out in that myriad of words (the name always rings a bell in my head - as does Casablanca, which has such exotic ring to it - with so much history and of course the Copenhegan interpretation). I was startled when I found out that it was a play on the famous meeting of Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in the autumn of 1941 at Copenhegan (which Bohr remembered as September and Hiesenberg as October, or so it was in the play). D agreed to watch it without battling an eye lid but with a smile - mysterious as it appeared, I knew what it was for - this play would be fodder for my pseudo-intellectual show off at social gatherings, which I admit I don't forfeit, given a chance (rather I grab it at the first opportune moment).
The play was scheduled at 7:30 pm in the evening and having booked the tickets in the morning while sipping my bed tea, I was restless throughout the day. I was so looking forward for the day to wane and as the long shadows went past the building oppposite to our apartment I started hinting D, subtly though, to shut down her laptop and get ready for the play.
We reached Ranga Shankara just in time to grab a bite - since the play was almost 2.5 hrs long, it was a wise thing to do - and also grab a seat which was anything but a compromise (Ranga Shankara is pretty well designed, accoustically speaking, nevertheless I feel that a sense of 'being cornered' creeps in if you are not sitting in the middle rows). Before Mr Karnard's voice over asked us to switch off our mobiles, D pointed out to me how there were a few eager ones in the audience, clicking pictures and promptly posting them on SM.
As the play started with names like Fermi, Pauli, Chadwick, Dirac thrown in casually (it was Bohr and Heisenberg talking about their peers so what else would you expect, or as Heisenberg says in the course of the play, they were the innermost electrons of Bohr) I could sense a rush of emotions in my head. With so much of history, morality, theoretical physics entwined with politics and just the right dose of drama, I almost had a lump in my throat.
A father figure to many theoretical physicists of that era, Bohr is described in the play as their spiritual leader (Pope is how his wife, Margrethe, refers him during one of the lighter moments of the play). With just three actors the play covers almost three decades of the twentieth century, circa 1924 to events ending in the year 1949.
I had done some reading about the play in the morning and knew that it had had multiple shows at Broadway and London National Theater. Here in Bangalore, however, this was the only show and with the lackluster response it doesn't seem like there would be more shows (what a pity!). To top that, I even saw a few walking out in the middle of the play. It shouldn't, however, be any reflection on the wonderful performances by all the three actors who gave their heart and sole to bring to life the believable and humane side of the greats.
The 1941 rendezvous between Heisenberg and his spiritual guru Bohr is wrapped in mystery to this day and there have been numerous conjectures regarding what they discussed. This play picks up one such thread and digs out political, social, nationalistic, scientific, geographical perspectives of the first half of the tumultuous century which has shaped the current world and defined so many nationalistic prejudices. There is absent mindedness of Bohr, mathematical faux pas of Heisenberg, glimpses of German penury after first world war and subsequent resurrection, gestapo's outreach, fascism and Nazi pride, Auschwitz - this play is actually one huge tome of history in itself.
When Heisenberg recounts his story (or his side of history) of crawling in a war torn Berlin (I am presuming that is at the end of first world war) to buy daily essentials, promising all along to himself to not let his children and grandchildren be born in such poverty, I was deeply enthused, even moved! He also recounts how 1920's was such a wonderful decade where he earned his PhD under Bohr and also how he became so close to Bohr's family at Copenhagen. These insights made the play really interesting.
And the life-changing decisions of the greats based on their perspective of the situation - Heisenberg remains in Germany after the war because of the love for his land and what he had seen, Bohr abhors Germany, Hitler and finally escapes to Las Alamos, via Sweden (which again as Heisenberg recalls was facilitated by a contact he had at the German embassy) - which the play so seamlessly incorporates in the course of its running, are rare gems that are hard to find in any war literature. Some other gems that I collected from this play are how Heisenberg was an expert piano player and could pick what note was being played, in the midst of a lunch where many of his peers are discussing, well what else, physics. How he had to cycle for three consecutive nights to escape from Berlin after the war had ended to reach a monastery in a West German village and like a lost, adamant child (without a caring, helping hand of his foster father) was trying to build the bomb. They had dug a hole near that monastery and had run multiple iterations in trying to reach the critical mass and trigger the chain reaction for fission, with only a lump of Cadmium as the controlling element - an idea at which Bohr is shown scoffing at in the play.
History is victor's story and this play so clandestinely touches this part in its second half (a ten minute-break divided the play into halves). After the war and long after the dust of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had settled, when Heisenberg reaches America, all the physicists present there refuse to shake hands with him. The victors, who were responsible for killing more than one lakh people would not shake hands with a physicist, who had fought his own war of morality and the promises that he had made as a young lad to revive Germany to its old glory. The victors, who raced ahead in the war, all thanks to the enormous money pumped into the Manhattan Project and with the degree of stress incomparable to what Heisenberg had undergone, not to forget frequent bombings which broke more than physical structures around Heisenberg. Physics was defeated by economics and what evolved out of it was a capitalist uni-polar world (who knows what would have happened if Heisenberg had sold his soul to the devil, buried his morality and had been successful in creating the bomb - a completely new world order may be; more fanatic and chaotic but would that be any different from the disheveled world we have inherited now?).
The play revisits a scene multiple times, where Bohr and Heisenberg go for a stroll on that autumn night of 1941 and each revisit gives a different treatment to the snapping at of Bohr at probably what Heisenberg said. At the start of the play it shows a warm camaraderie between the two, in further iterations it opens up the mind of Heisenberg and his moral dilemma regarding the bomb, shows the layers of queries floating in Bohr's and Heisenberg's minds. The play's climax is a very intelligent "what if" scenario - What if Bohr had not snapped at Heisenberg and instead cross questioned his intentions and provided him the warm adobe that the self-doubting Heisenberg had come to seek from Bohr. Probably then, history would have no mention of a "fat man", or the "little boy", rather an Ubermensch!
