Werner Heisenberg's Wartime Visit

Werner Heisenberg's wartime visit to Niels Bohr, recently dramatized in Michael Frayn's play "Copenhagen," has, sixty years after the event, just taken a new turn. In a letter made public yesterday for the first time, Bohr accuses Heisenberg of misleading others, in the aftermath of WW II, by claiming to have purposely undermined the German atom bomb effort. In the letter, composed around 1957, Bohr claims that in his recollection of their encounter Heisenberg seemed less ambivalent (and more knowledgeable) about building a bomb than Heisenberg later implied. This letter, now made public by the Niels Bohr Archive in Denmark, was never sent and has since Bohr's death in 1962 been sealed away, leaving physicists, historians, and now artists to wonder about Heisenberg's motives. Upcoming events surrounding the play "Copenhagen" include a month of performances at Kennedy Center in Washington, DC; a daylong symposium on March 2 at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, including physicists, historians, the President's science advisor John Marburger, Heisenberg's son, and Bohr's grandson; and a session on the subject at the April APS meeting in Albuquerque.