The play Copenhagen, playing itself out through dialogues between Bohr and Heisenberg, examines the relation between science, objective reality and the ethics of scientific applications. Travelling between the near and the distant past, between recorded history and speculative possibilities, the play reveals how science is done—the rather exciting enterprise that science is and could be. It examines the trajectory of how scientific questions are designed, encountered, faced up to, how the methodologies are chosen, how multiple solutions are offered to one problem, and how solutions get validated/legitimated. The play also reinstates the fact that science, ultimately, is done by humans for other humans; that cultural and subjective contexts and backgrounds inform the process of problem selection, imagination, practice and implementation of science, that the context of scientific discovery is intimately tied to the context of justification. Observation, observer and the observed come together in a curious interplay, shaping the contours of one another. Copenhagen is also about the understanding of ‘reality’—what reality is and what our relation with reality is. It places science in history and context; it shows how science, in the last instance is done by humans with all too human emotions, anxieties, aggression, obstinacy, insecurities—and how, notwithstanding its apparently murky birth, science emerges as the enterprise (only) of beautiful minds. Copenhagen is a complex narrative; interwoven with scientific and human details; set between the 1920s and the 1940s it would not just be deeply instructive to students of science but would also generate self-reflection.
The play Copenhagen, playing itself out through dialogues between Bohr and Heisenberg, examines the relation between science, objective reality and the ethics of scientific applications. Travelling between the near and the distant past, between recorded history and speculative possibilities, the play reveals how science is done—the rather exciting enterprise that science is and could be. It examines the trajectory of how scientific questions are designed, encountered, faced up to, how the methodologies are chosen, how multiple solutions are offered to one problem, and how solutions get validated/legitimated. The play also reinstates the fact that science, ultimately, is done by humans for other humans; that cultural and subjective contexts and backgrounds inform the process of problem selection, imagination, practice and implementation of science, that the context of scientific discovery is intimately tied to the context of justification. Observation, observer and the observed come together in a curious interplay, shaping the contours of one another. Copenhagen is also about the understanding of ‘reality’—what reality is and what our relation with reality is. It places science in history and context; it shows how science, in the last instance is done by humans with all too human emotions, anxieties, aggression, obstinacy, insecurities—and how, notwithstanding its apparently murky birth, science emerges as the enterprise (only) of beautiful minds. Copenhagen is a complex narrative; interwoven with scientific and human details; set between the 1920s and the 1940s it would not just be deeply instructive to students of science but would also generate self-reflection.
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