Regular marked price: $12.95Discount Price: $10.36
Cost Savings: $2.59 (20%)Price fluctuation possible.
How soon does it ship: Normal ship time within one day
Shipping? Absolutely FREE if you qualify for Super Saver Shipping.
Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 822.914
EAN num: 9780385720793
ISBN number: 0385720793
Label: Anchor
Manufacturer: Anchor
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 144
Printing Date: August 08, 2000
Publishing house: Anchor
Release Date: August 08, 2000
Sale Popularity Level: 118560
Studio: Anchor
Other books you might be interested in perusing:
Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
The Tony Award—winning play that soars at the intersection of science and art, Copenhagen is an explosive re-imagining of the mysterious wartime meeting between two Nobel laureates to discuss the atomic bomb.
In 1941 the German physicist Werner Heisenberg made a clandestine trip to Copenhagen to see his Danish counterpart and friend Niels Bohr. Their work together on quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle had revolutionized atomic physics. But now the world had changed and the two men were on opposite sides in a world war. Why Heisenberg went to Copenhagen and what he wanted to say to Bohr are questions that have vexed historians ever since. In Michael Frayn’s ambitious, fiercely intelligent, and daring new play Heisenberg and Bohr meet once again to discuss the intricacies of physics and to ponder the metaphysical—the very essence of human motivation.
Amazon.com Review:
For most people, the principles of nuclear physics are not only incomprehensible but inhuman. The popular image of the men who made the bomb is of dispassionate intellects who number-crunched their way towards a weapon whose devastating power they could not even imagine. But in his Tony Award-winning play Copenhagen, Michael Frayn shows us that these men were passionate, philosophical, and all too human, even though one of the three historical figures in his drama, Werner Heisenberg, was the head of the Nazis' effort to develop a nuclear weapon. The play's other two characters, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr and his wife, Margrethe, are involved with Heisenberg in an after-death analysis of an actual meeting that has long puzzled historians. In 1941, the German scientist visited Bohr, his old mentor and long-time friend, in Copenhagen. After a brief discusion in the Bohrs' home, the two men went for a short walk. What they discussed on that walk, and its implications for both scientists, have long been a mystery, even though both scientists gave (conflicting) accounts in later years.
Frayn's cunning conceit is to use the scientific underpinnings of atomic physics, from Schrödinger's famous cat to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, to explore how an individual's point of view renders attempts to discover the ultimate truth of any human interaction fundamentally impossible. To Margrethe, Heisenberg was always an untrustworthy student, eager to steal from her husband's knowledge. To Bohr, Heisenberg was a brilliant if irresponsible foster son, whose lack of moral compass was part of his genius. As for Heisenberg, the man who could have built the bomb but somehow failed to, his dilemma is at the heart of the play's conflict. Frayn's clever dramatic structure, which returns repeatedly to particular scenes from different points of view, allows several possible theories as to what his motives could have been. This isn't the very first play to successfully merge the worlds of science and theater (one is inevitably reminded of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia and Hapgood), but it's certainly one of the most dramatically successful. --John Longenbaugh
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
-
Why did Heisenberg come to Copenhagen? Was he there to prod his former mentor for information on America's nuclear program? Or, was he there to gloat? Perhaps to reach a bargain; we won't build it if you don't? Perhaps to warn Bohr: Leave now before it is too late. Or, merely to pick the brain of the old master? About that calculation, did you say two tons or two kilos? Then again, Bohr was a kind of deity. Could Heisenberg have come to him for absolution: Forgive me Father for I have sinned; the Nazis made me do it. Or, is it possible that a German could actually be a goodie. After all, Heisenberg never built "the" bomb. Indeed, after the war Heisenberg asserted that though he possessed the scientific ability to construct a bomb, he instead steered the Nazis towards the production of a reactor.
Uncertainty. It allows Frayne to explore science, morality, politics and memory, all of which are inexorably linked. Explore is the operative word, here. Nothing in the play is ever really resolved but Frayne does use Heisenberg's "uncertainty principle" to consider and explore the subjective nature of observation, which in this case relates not only to the workings of the atom but to the human mind as well.
Rated by buyers 
-
Michael Frayn, Copenhagen (Anchor, 1998)
Copenhagen 2000 Tony Award winner for best play, turns on a rather simple premise: Niels Bohr, his wife Margrethe, and Werner Heisenberg, who were all together at a brief meeting in 1941 which has confused historians ever since, are back together after death. They are trying to piece out what actually happened that night; it seems they don't remember what happened that night any more than do those who have written so many pages about it over the years. In the process, they also dissect quantum physics, argue the viability of the atomic bomb (and why Heisenberg didn't think it was possible, while Bohr ended up being a small, but instrumental, player on Oppenheimer's team), and in general behave like old friends who have grown old and crotchety.
Frayn is obviously coming from the Waiting for Godot school of drama here, as the play is absent any action whatsoever; all the events are described by the three players. This has been expressed by a large number of the play's critics as a weakness. Whether or not you see it as one is, well, pretty much up to you; in all honesty, it never really occurred to me to consider it a weakness while I was actually reading the play, which I take as a positive thing.
The real reason to pick this up, though, is in Frayn's rather long afterword. (One wonders if anyone considered having one of the actors come out and relate it after each performance.) While the play itself does a decent job at demystifying the physics and mechanics of the various details about which Bohr and Heisenberg spent most of their lives niggling, the play's afterword both puts these details, and the nigglers, into the larger picture of their culture and time and elucidates a few things that someone simply seeing the play is likely to still not understand (such as how much of Frayn's various ideas as to what happened in the mysterious conversation he pulled out from under his arm, and how much has actually been posited by scholars). While the play itself is interesting, the afterword is fascinating, and the two together make for a good read. *** ½
Rated by buyers 
-
Reading a play poses challenges, as one must imagine it as a production while reading it as a book, and Michael Frayn's "Copenhagen" is no exception. Written without stage directions or set descriptions, and relying solely on dialogue, this three-person play describes the complicated relationship between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, two physicists responsible for groundbreaking work in quantum physics. With Bohr's wife Margrethe acting as a fulcrum, the two great physicists discuss their lives before, during, and after World War II, using Heisenberg's visits to Copenhagen as focal points. Probably the most radical device Frayn uses is skipping around in time (appropriate given the mention of Einstein) where the characters speak after they have died as well as in the past, often with one describing to the audience what is happening or what something means while the other two interact; the reader has to be astute enough to "hear" the change in tone to know whether the characters are speaking in the past or as deceased observers, especially since the change can occur from one sentence to the next. This play gathers its power mostly near the end as certain principles of quantum mechanics, particularly the ability of an atomic particle to act like both matter and wave, clarify these relationships. Issues of personal responsibility and negligence ignite the last pages.
But is this drama? Frayn does not create scenes except through expository writing and discussions. Action is described rather than shown, and thematic development is contained solely in the words spoken by the characters. What's worse, the characters seem too aware of the implications of their actions, making the dialogue somewhat heavy-handed. I would expect skilled actors to be able to magnify the glimpses of deep emotion as well as enliven what is already an intriguing concept, but in lesser hands, this play could end up as a mere exercise. The cover perfectly describes the starkness of "Copenhagen": three industrial chairs on an empty stage, two characters talking while another looks on.
Frayn's postscript lends context to the play, and I recommend not skipping it since this is an intellectual play about an intellectual topic. Particularly interesting is Frayn's description of fact, background, interpretation, and pure imagination on his part.
The average play reader should find "Copenhagen" fascinating. The basics of quantum mechanics are rendered in understandable and digestible bits. If you are planning to see a production of "Copenhagen" in the near future, the book is worth purchasing for the postscript; it should enhance your enjoyment of the production.
Rated by buyers -
This book contains the text of Michael Frayn's Tony Award-winning play (94 pages), a fascinating 38-page Postscript, and a two-page word sketch of the scientific and historical background to the play.
The play itself is brilliant (see my review of the PBS production directed by Howard Davies, starring Stephen Rea, Daniel Craig, and Francesca Annis available on DVD) and is the kind of play that can be fully appreciated simply by reading it. There are no stage directions, no mention of props or stage business. There is simply Frayn's extraordinary dialogue. A photo from the cover suggests how the play might be staged on a round table with the three characters, Danish physicist Niels Bohr, his wife Margrethe, and German physicist Werner Heisenberg, going slowly round and round as in an atom. This symbolism is intrinsic to the ideas of the play with Bohr seen as the stolid proton at the center and the younger Heisenberg the flighty electron that "circles." Margrethe who brings both common sense and objectivity to the interactions between the ever circling physicists, might be thought of as a neutron, or perhaps she is the photon that illuminates (and deflects ever so slightly) what it touches.
At the center of the play (and at the center of our understanding of the world through quantum mechanics) is a fundamental uncertainty. While Heisenberg and Bohr demonstrated to the world through the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics that there will always be something we cannot in principle know regardless of how fine our measurements, Frayn's play suggests that there will always be some uncertainty about what went on between the two great architects of QM during Heisenberg's celebrated and fateful visit to the Bohr household in occupied Denmark in 1941. There is uncertainty at the heart of not only our historical tools but at the very heart of human memory (as Frayn explains in the Postscript).
"The great challenge facing the storyteller and the historian alike is to get inside people's heads... Even when all the external evidence has been mastered, the only way into the protagonists' heads is through the imagination. This indeed is the substance of the play." (p. 97)
The three characters appear as ghosts of their former selves, as it were, and begin immediately an endeavor to unravel and understand what happened in 1941. The central question is Why did Heisenberg come to Copenhagen? Was it an endeavor to enlist Bohr in a German atomic bomb project? Was it to get information from Bohr about an Allied project or to pick his brain for ideas on how to make fission work? Or was it, as Margrethe avers, to "show himself off"--the little boy grown up, the man who was once part of a defeated country, now triumphant?
The play leaves it for us to find an answer, because neither history nor the recorded words of the participants give us anything close to certainty. With the conflicting statements of the characters Frayn implies that the truth may be a matter of one's point of view, that is, it may be a question of relativity. Ultimately it may even be that Heisenberg himself did not know why he came to Copenhagen.
Also being asked by Frayn's play is a moral question. Is it right for scientists to build weapons of mass destruction to be used on civilian targets? Heisenberg contends that this is the question he wanted to ask of Bohr. It is ironic that although Heisenberg was condemned by physicists around the world for his (presumed) unsuccessful endeavor to build a fission bomb for Hitler, his work killed no one, while the universally beloved and admired Bohr had a hand in the Manhattan project that resulted in the bombs that were dropped on the Japanese cities.
As the electron is seen and then not seen, its speed measured and then not measured, but never both at the same time, so it is with Heisenberg's character in life and in this play. We are never sure where he is. Is he working for the Nazis or is he only pretending to? Is he working on a reactor or is he working on a bomb? Did he delay the German project intentionally (as he claimed), or was the failure due to incompetence, or even--as Frayn suggests--to an unconscious quirk of Heisenberg's mind?
In the Postscript Frayn recalls the historical evidence he used in constructing the play and cites his sources and gives us insights into what Bohr and Heisenberg were like. He quotes Max Born, describing Heisenberg as having an "unbelievable quickness and precision of understanding," while "the most characteristic property" of Bohr, as described by George Gamow, "was the slowness of his thinking and comprehension." One can see where Frayn got his metaphor of the atom with its heavy nucleus and its speedy electron. But Bohr was also thoughtful and thorough while Heisenberg was "careless with numbers." And of course these are relative terms since both men were Nobel ... Read More
Rated by buyers -
COPENHAGEN is a play that welcomes a reading. The structure of pure dialogue between the physicists, Heisenberg, Bohr and Bohr's wife Margrethe( who represents the non-physicists in the audience) lends itself to the closer examination the written word gives us. Michael Frayn brilliantly imagines a moment frozen in time- Heisenberg arrives from Germany in 1941 to discuss something with his mentor, Bohr in occupied Copenhagen. Seizing upon this historical event and its mysterious circumstances, Frayn recreates the event from a variety of perspectives in pursuit of a greater truth. Was Heisenberg a hero, who kept the Nazi's from achieving the ultimate weapon, or a victim of his own carelessness?
Reading the play, gives you the time to reflect upon how creatively Frayn frames each of his scenarios. The dialogue is never less than challenging, even while playing to the audience surrogate, Margrethe. Frayn uses these two great minds to introduce the audience into the realm of advanced physics and the moral ambiguities involved in the mixing of pure science with the nature of war. The forced civility between the two men emphasizes the underlying current of terror created by the Nazis rise to power and the oncoming dawn of an atomic age. Frayn does not offer any easy answers, to do so would be an insult to the wonderful work that has gone on before.
The postscript alone is worth the price of the book for any fan of the play. It sets up the historical context for the play's creation and gives the reader a much greater understanding of where Frayn came up with many of the issues he examines in this work.
Find other books like this one:
