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Germany, for he had often tried, as he put it, "to make warfare serve
physics by demonstrating how physics could serve warfare."
Margrethe's charge in the play that Heisenberg didn't "understand
the physics" is supported by Jeremy Bernstein's thorough analysis in his
edition of the Farm Hall documents,
Hitler's Uranium Club
(1996).
Frayn in his play's postscript comes to the same "inescapable" conclu–
sion that is "beyond a reasonable doubt": Heisenberg did not do the
necessary and correct calculation of what would be needed for a critical
mass. He therefore thought that the technical problems of making the
bomb would be much too difficult to solve during the war. "The effects
of real enthusiasm and real determination are incalculable," Frayn
points out, but they are "sometimes decisive." Ironically, the Allied pro–
ject had these qualities in large part because of a reasonable fear that
German scientists might make the bomb, which Hitler would then
surely use with devastating effect.
Plays seldom create a stir among scientists, but
Copenhagen
has done
that. As a result the Bohr family decided to release, much earlier than
had been planned, eleven documents on Bohr's drafts of letters to
Heisenberg, which he never sent, about their controversial meeting in
Copenhagen. Bohr was responding sixteen years later to Heisenberg's
account of it as reported in Robert Jungk's
Brighter than a Thousand
Suns
(1957).
A letter to Heisenberg on the issue was found in Bohr's
personal copy of the book. He maintained that Heisenberg had given
him the impression, though he spoke in "vague terms," that "Germany
was participating vigorously in a race to be the first with atomic
weapons" and "I did not sense even the slightest hint that you and your
friends were making efforts in another direction."
Bohr claimed to have remembered "every word" of their conversa–
tion, though in another draft he acknowledged more credibly "how dif–
ficult it is to form an accurate impression of events in which many have
taken part." Heisenberg is surely believable when he wrote of their
attempt in
I947
to reconstruct what had been said in
1941:
"we noticed
that both our memories had become blurred." Bohr's drafts of his let–
ters of
J
957
cannot and have not settled the issue. Distinguished scien–
tists still take contrasting views of the episode. Some think he was
possibly trying to get Bohr "to be a messenger of conscience, and
wanted Bohr to persuade the Allied sc ientists also to refrain from work–
ing on a bomb," as Hans A. Bethe, a Cornell University physicist and
Nobel Prize winner, has put it. This view is also endorsed by Klaus
Gottstein of the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, who
worked under Heisenberg when he was director from
1950-1971.
Cas-
