David Weinberger reviews a popular Copanhagic play about physicists:
We saw Michael Frayn?s Tony-award-winning play, ?Copenhagen,? last night. Disappointing.
It?s about the mysterious meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg in 1941 in Newark, NJ. (Nope. In Copenhagen. Just kidding. Haha.) The play goes over various ?drafts? of the meeting, trying out possible explanations of why Heisenberg, a loyal German (or is he??), would seek out his former mentor, a half-Jewish Dane living in Nazi-occupied Denmark. Heisenberg was the head of the German effort to create an atomic bomb (or was he??), and Bohr snuck out of Denmark and joined the Manhattan project (or did he?? ? well, yes, he did). … But it?s over-written and, worse, depends upon a stupid pun: Y?see, Heisenberg is famous for his Uncertainty Principle, and all of human understanding is also uncertain, so since both use the word ?uncertainty,? they?ve got to be the same thing, right? So, let?s make a play about it.
Yech.
Say, I have an idea! Let?s write a play called ?Croton? about Pythagoras. It will draw a dramatic parallel (so to speak) between Pythagoras? theorom about right angles and his own uprightness. ?It is all a matter of finding and living the right angle,? he will say. ?After all, aren?t we all a hypoteneuse??