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Regarding the WWII Meeting of Bohr & Heisenberg
HarlanC writes: "The NY Times has an article (registration required) discussing the famous meeting between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in Copenhagen in 1941. The conclusion is that Heisenberg revealed to Bohr the existance of a Nazi atomic program in an attempt to obtain assistance from Bohr. The Times of London article is here (long registration process required)" The play "Copenhagen" was based on a fictionalization of this meeting, it was much better than "Proof", I assure you.
"Alsos", by Samuel Goudsmit, (ISBN: 1563964155) describes the top-secret team that followed Allied forces into Europe to find out how close the Germans were to having nuclear weapons.
I strongly recommend the book Heisenberg's War by Thomas Powers. It provides a much deeper background into this meeting (and the entire German nuclear arms program) and is quite readable. Here's a bn.com link to the book if you want to avoid amazon.
For my engineering/chemistry professor last year i needed to write a Biographyon this man. My biography is pretty in depth and a worthy read if anyone is interested. It can be found @ http://artlu.net/essays/wernerbio.html Enjoy, AJ
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artlu.net
He was an OSS operative.
There's nothing that specifically indicates this, of course. But look at the human site of the game. Here was a man who worshipped Einstein, who had many other associations with Jewish scientists, and who himself narrowly escaped academic blacklisting when the Nazis took power. And somehow he ends up as scientific chief of a major German weapons project!
There's actually a well-documented meeting with an OSS agent in Geneva. Official histories state that Heisenberg was there to give a talk, and the agent, Moe Berg, was there to determine the progress of the German bomb effort and (at his own discretion!) terminate Heisenberg. Supposedly Heisenberg told Berg that the project wasn't going well, and Berg took his word for it and let him live. Not, in my opinion, a very plausible story.
OK, no evidence at all for this theory. But it's worth thinking about.
Having seen Copenhagen and Proof, I feel that the superior drama was most assuredly "Proof." However, from a techno-geek's standpoint, I can see why the submitter might enjoy Copenhagen more.
'hagen was definitely more cerebral & technical, and used physics as a metophor for ethical struggles.
Proof was a much more personal play about a woman's relationship with her father (and indeed, the world around her.) The math is simply part of the plot, not interwoven with the primary thrust. I saw both original casts, and both were phenominal, but the interaction between Mary Louise Parker and the cast was one of the most thrilling dramatic performances I've ever witnessed. She was incredible.
As a coincidence, the young male lead in Proof was played by Ben Shenkman, who was the young rabinical guy in "Pi."
While I loved Copenhagen, and I love Robert Westenburg (one of the male leads) I felt Proof was the far superior play.
You're making it sound like there was months between these events. Hiroshima was August 6th, the Soviet Union declared war on the 8th, the Nagasaki bombing was on the 9th, and the surrender was on the 14th. That's a total of 8 days from start to finish. I think that's an amazingly fast response time. The Japanese military & leadership had to evalulate the damage, try and work out the responses they could do, all in an enviroment where all normal communications had been cut off.
The problem is in Reading vs. Performance.
I have a degree in Math and have done many years of semi-professional acting (i.e. I get paid, but not so much that I don't need my CS job to live)
Copenhagen was a better written play, but I pity and respect the man who tries to perform it. Long difficult monologues where the audience will often want to stand up and say, "Could you repeat that, I only half got it." But when you're reading it and can appreciate the nuance. Copenhagen was by far a superior piece of writing in the history, the math, and especially in the interpersonal relationship between the two men. First as teacher-student, then nearly to father-son, then suddenly to bitter enemies. It is practically shakespere-ian in how dynamic their relationship was and those aspects were very strongly and humanely played out.
To talk about Proof, it would be easy to produce, easy to get an audience, and easy to make people feel smart because they were watching a play that had math in it. The actors have plenty of opportunity to showboat and draw an audience in, but fundamentally, the play is about smart men who are too pig-headed to trust a girl. (*gasp!* it's a GIRL! Not a big shocker any more) As soon as the play uses up its 90 minutes, the boyfriend pulls the stick from his bum and then everything is fine. He shouldn't have mistrusted her in the first place, but then the play would be about 15 minutes long.
To sum up: Proof is fun to watch chickies who do math and physicist who drink heavily. Copenhagen is an excellent play to expand your scope and see a truly powerful piece of writing.
I've seen estimates (sorry, can't remember references) that the Germans in WWII spent as much on rocketry research as the Manhatten Project. They had the resources; just used them differently.
American Scientist had a really good article on this back in 1996.
Heisenberg had estimated that a ton of U-235 was needed to reach critical mass, which was, of course, a huge overestimate. This is the reasoning he gave in a conversation with Otto Hahn immediately after being surprised by the news of Hiroshima (the conversation was secretly taped by the Allies):
"If I have pure 235 each neutron will immediately beget two children and then there must be a chain reaction which goes very quickly. Then you can reckon as follows. One neutron always makes two others in pure 235. That is to say that in order to make 10^24 neutrons I need 80 reactions one after the other. Therefore I need 80 collisions and the mean free path is about 6 centimetres. In order to make 80 collisions, I must have a lump of a radius of about 54 centimetres and that would be about a ton."
Can you see the mistake in his logic?