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Nanette Shaw
A historic all-day symposium in connection with the New York presentation of Michael Frayn's hit play Copenhagen will be held at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York on Monday, March 27. Copenhagen presents a fictional reconstruction of the visit by the brilliant German physicist Werner Heisenberg to his famous mentor Niels Bohr in Nazi occupied Denmark in 1941. The play, which has been a major success in London, will be opening on Broadway at the Royale Theatre in April, with previews beginning on March 23 One of the symposium’s sessions will explore the related science — including talks by some of Heisenberg’s and Bohr’s contemporaries — and another will look at the historic context. Both sessions are free and open to the public on a first-come, first-served basis. A third session on the play itself, including an appearance by Frayn, is sold out (although press tickets are available). Preceded by a science exhibition, the symposium is being presented by The Graduate Center and Ensemble Studio Theater/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science & Technology Project and will take place in The Graduate Center’s Proshansky Auditorium, 365 Fifth Avenue at 34th Street. For further information call 1-212-817-7521. During the morning of the symposium, the exhibit To Advance & Diffuse the Knowledge of Physics will be opened by Nobel Laureate Jerome Friedman, and guided tours will be conducted by the curator, Dr. Sara Schechner. This museum-quality historical exhibit was created on behalf of the American Physical Society in observation of the Society's centennial in1999. The exhibit opened at the centennial in Atlanta in March 1999 and has since been shown, to great acclaim, in the Washington area on Capitol Hill, the American Center for Physics, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Though no one alive knows what actually happened in the historic encounter between Heisenberg and Bohr, various writers in the past have speculated that Heisenberg wanted to find out whether the allies were working on an atomic bomb, or to tell Bohr that the Germans were, and the play examines this matter. It also casts light on the hotly disputed question of whether Heisenberg deliberately slowed down the Nazi effort or whether the failure of the Germans to achieve a chain reaction was due to their lack of understanding of the scientific and technological requirements. The symposium will be examining these questions as well as the underlying science. The science session — to be held from 12:30 to 2:30 p.m. -- will focus on the physics of quantum mechanics and of the atomic bomb. The history session — from 3:00 to 5:15 p.m. — will explore the period and the personalities involved, including the roles of Bohr, Heisenberg, and others mentioned in the play. The sold-out evening session on the theatrical realization of the ideas and events will be held from 7:30 to 9:00 p.m. and will feature the playwright and others taking part in the production. Among the speakers will be several who intimately knew and worked with both Bohr and Heisenberg. The 93-year-old Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe has responded to an invitation to speak by saying "…I should like to give a major talk…on the subject 'Why the Germans did not achieve an atomic bomb.' I feel well qualified for this, having studied the relevant Farm Hall records [transcripts of the conversations among German scientists who were interned in England at the end of World War II]." John Archibald Wheeler, who together with Niels Bohr explained fission in 1939 and who is prominently mentioned in the play, will speak on "Niels Bohr, Nuclear Fission and the Bomb." Other prominent scientists and historians on the program include David Cassidy, Brian Greene, Gerald Holton, Eugen Merzbacher, Frederick Seitz, Fay Ajzenberg-Selove, and Anton Zeilinger. In addition to The Graduate Center and the Ensemble Studio Theater/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the event is being presented by The Lounsbery Foundation, The American Physical Society, and The Niels Bohr Library of the American Institute of Physics Center for History of Physics. The Graduate Center is the doctorate-granting institution of The City University of New York, the largest urban university in the U.S. The only consortium of its kind in the nation, The Graduate Center draws its faculty of more than 1,600 members mainly from the CUNY senior colleges and cultural and scientific institutions throughout New York City. Established in 1961, The Graduate Center has grown to an enrollment of nearly 4,000 students in 31 doctoral programs and seven master's degree programs in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. The Graduate Center also houses 24 research centers and institutes and administers the CUNY Baccalaureate Program. According to a recent National Research Council report, more than a third of The Graduate Center's rated programs rank among the nation's top 20 at public and private institutions, nearly a quarter are among the top ten when compared to publicly supported institutions alone, and more than half are among the top five programs at publicly supported institutions in the northeast. Further information on The Graduate Center's programs and activities can be found on its Web site at: www.gc.cuny.edu. |