Yet even as humanity enjoys the benefits of these scientific advances, scientists seem to enjoy, at best, qualified approval in Western society. Scientists are often viewed ambivalently, as creating as many problems for mankind as they solve. Western societies show powerful currents of primitivism (Barzun, 2000, pp. xv, xvii) that would undo the complications wrought by science and return humanity to an imagined simpler state of existence. Western literature is rife with negative portrayals of scientists: Mary Shelley’s archetypal “mad scientist” Dr. Frankenstein in 1817; H.G. Wells’s Dr. Moreau in 1896; Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove in 1964; and numerous other characters ranging from comic-book evil geniuses to absent-minded professors. These portrayals, as Weart notes in his 1988 study of cultural images of nuclear energy, both reflect and reinforce popular impressions of scientists as possible threats to humanity.

Concerns about whether science will lead humanity to salvation or extinction have heightened since 1945, when the United States detonated the first atomic bombs. Two plays from the nuclear age, Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo (the 1947 “Laughton version”) and Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen (1998), voice those concerns not through fictional scientists, but through dramatic interpretations of three of the most prominent and influential scientists of Western civilization: Galileo Galilei, Niels Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg. Both plays demonstrate that scientists pose the greatest challenge to civilization not with their inventions, but with their ideas.

Galileo presents scenes spanning 33 years in the life of the Italian scientist, from his introduction to the Dutch-invented telescope, his discovery of the moons of Jupiter, through his renunciation of his scientific discoveries in 1633 and subsequent house arrest. The play shows Galileo as a moderately successful inventor. Shown in the first scene struggling to make a living as a scholar and teacher, Galileo produces an improved design for the telescope, which the Senate buys for 500 scudi. Galileo makes further profitable connections in Scene 2 by impressing Matti, a Florentine iron founder, with a design for a machine. In Scene 3, Priuli the curator refers to “a first rate water pump and the irrigation works” that Galileo designed for the city.

Galileo’s successful inventions provide him the income he needs to satisfy his epicurean desires and to build a sufficient dowry for his daughter Virginia. They cause him no trouble with the authorities. The Senate appreciates the military and economic advantages Galileo’s inventions provide. The Church as well sees little danger in such technological advances; Cardinal Bellarmin in Scene 6 says of Galileo’s research, “If it makes navigation easier for sailors to use new charts based on a new hypothesis let them have them. We only have to scotch doctrines that contradict Holy Writ.”

There, in doctrine, lies the rub for Galileo. In a debate about science with a young monk in Scene 7, Galileo acknowledges that technology is secondary to promoting rational, scientific thought. Referring to the monk’s peasant parents, Galileo says, “Naturally, if they don’t get a move on and learn to think for themselves, the most efficient of irrigation systems cannot help them.” Earlier in the debate, Galileo argues that technology is dependent upon completely open scientific inquiry: “How can new machinery be evolved to domesticate the river water if we physicists are forbidden to study, discuss, and pool our findings about the greatest machinery of all, the machinery of the heavenly bodies?” In Scene 4, when a philosopher asks Galileo where his pursuit of such cosmic truths is leading, Galileo replies, “Are we, as scholars, concerned with where the truth might lead us?”

The truth leads Galileo to direct conflict with Church doctrine. Galileo’s discovery of mountains on the earth’s moon and satellites around Jupiter lend support to the Copernican model of the solar system. This idea conflicts with Biblical statements that the sun moves around the earth: as Cardinal Barberini challenges Galileo in Scene 6, “‘The sun riseth and setteth and returneth to its place,’ saith the Bible. What saith Galilei?” The modern reader might think such a discrepancy inconsequential, but in seventeenth-century Italy, Galileo’s data called into question the infallibility of the Bible and the entire worldview of the Church and society that saw humanity at the center of god’s creation. “I am informed that Mr. Galilei transfers mankind from the center of the universe to somewhere on the outskirts,” grouses an old cardinal in Scene 5:

Mr. Galilei is therefore an enemy of mankind and must be dealt with as such. Is it conceivable that God would trust this most precious fruit of His labor to a minor frolicking star? Would He have sent His Son to such a place? How can there be people with such twisted minds that they believe what they are told by the slave of a multiplication table?

The greatest threat to faith is the doubt that is central to the scientific method Galileo promotes. In Scene 11, as the Pope and the Inquisitor prepare to seal Galileo’s fate, the Inquisitor warns that those who consult the multiplication tables and compasses for their answers do so only because they doubt. “Can society stand on doubt and not on faith?” he asks. Indeed, doubt motivates Galileo to challenge old-fashioned Aristotelian logic by testing statements empirically, as shown in the buoyancy experiments of Scene 8. In his final speech of Scene 8, Galileo outlines the modern scientific method and the doubt inherent in it: the good scientist must approach even his own hypotheses with the utmost skepticism, subjecting them to repeated observations, seeking all manner of empirical data that might disprove his own hypotheses before entertaining the notion that his hypotheses might be correct. He emphasizes the centrality of doubt to science in his monologue toward the end of  Scene 13 as well.

Galileo shows explicitly the conflict that a scientific theory and even the scientific method itself can create. Copenhagen, while extremely explicit about the scientific theories its characters create and confront, is perhaps more implicit about laying out the social implications of scientific theories. However, Frayn no less than Brecht demonstrates how science can challenge humanity’s concept of its purpose and place in the universe.

On one level, Copenhagen is about nuclear weapons and the moral responsibility of the scientists who created them. The main conflict of the play centers around the question of Heisenberg’s role in nuclear research in Nazi Germany during World War II (a role that remains in sharp dispute, as shown by the differing conclusions of historians like Pais [1991], Powers [1993], and Rose [1998]). Depending on which interpretation offered by the play a viewer accepts, Heisenberg either did not try to build a nuclear bomb, did not know how to build a nuclear bomb, or deliberately concealed information that might have allowed the Nazis to build a nuclear bomb. Whatever the case, Heisenberg expresses a distinct bitterness toward the ends of Acts I and II at the fact that he faced years of guilt and questions over his unclear role in the German nuclear program. “So explaining and defending myself was how I spent the last thirty years of my life. When I went to America in 1949 a lot of physicists wouldn’t even shake my hand. Hands that had actually built the bomb wouldn’t touch mine” (p. 47). Compounding this bitterness is Bohr’s freedom from any such questions or challenges to his morality. Even after playing what Bohr describes as his “small but helpful part in the deaths of a hundred thousand people” (p. 91), Heisenberg says that “No one has ever expected [Bohr] to explain or defend anything. He’s a profoundly good man” (p. 47).

With this seeming inversion of moral responsibility—a man who killed no one is esteemed less than the man who helped create a device that killed thousands—Copenhagen suggests that the invention of the nuclear bomb somehow demolished classical standards of morality. However, as is the case in Galileo, ideas and not inventions pose the real challenge to moral standards. The ideas in Copenhagen that threaten conventional ways of thinking are Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Bohr’s principle of complementarity.

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle describes the limitations on the precision of the information observers can gather about certain qualities of subatomic particles, due to the changes exerted on such particles by the very act of observation. This uncertainty is embodied throughout the play in the words and interaction of the three characters: Heisenberg, Bohr, and Bohr’s wife Margrethe. For example, immediately in Act I, Margrethe introduces the question of why Heisenberg came to Copenhagen in 1941. “He explained it over and over again,” she says, but, “Each time he explained it became more obscure” (p. 3). Heisenberg acknowledges the failure of his explanations: “The more I’ve explained, the deeper the uncertainty has become” (p. 4). Each explanation is like an observation of that meeting in Copenhagen, and each explanation changes and obscures the story as surely as each photon from an observer’s light will strike a subatomic particle and change and obscure the particle’s position.

Bohr’s principle—or “logical framework,” as Kafatos and Nadeau (1990, p. 83) argue it is better labeled—of complementarity expresses a fundamental dualism in the nature of the universe. The most common illustration of complementarity is the wave–particle duality. Photons are both waves and particles. Observers never see photons as both simultaneously, however; when they choose a method of observation, observers essentially choose whether the photon will manifest wavelike or particle-like characteristics. As Bohr says in Act II, “We have to choose one way of seeing them or the other. But as soon as we do we can’t know everything about them” (p. 69).

This statement may apply as much to understanding characters as photons. For instance, Heisenberg later describes his relationship to Bohr and to society in terms of complementarity:

I’m your enemy; I’m also your friend. I’m a danger to mankind; I’m also your guest. I’m a particle; I’m also a wave. We have one set of obligations to the world in general, and we have other sets, never to be reconciled, to our fellow-countrymen, to our neighbours, to our friends, to our family, to our children....All we can do is to look afterwards, and see what happened (pp. 77-78).

As Bohr states, “Uncertainty and complementarity became the two central tenets of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics” (pp. 70-71). In its discussion and metaphorical use of the Copenhagen Interpretation, Copenhagen offers an ironic response to the lament of the old cardinal in Galileo. Galileo threatened the social order by showing that the earth and humanity were peripheral and insignificant in the universe. “Not to exaggerate,” says Bohr, “but we turned the world inside out!... We put man back at the centre of the universe” (p. 71). The science of Heisenberg and Bohr says the universe is only that which is observed. An electron’s position is merely a conglomerate of probabilities until an observer performs an experiment that determines a location. A photon is both wave and particle—or neither—until an observer chooses a method of observation that brings one state into “reality” while excluding the other. Physical qualities like velocity, position, and wavelength, once thought to be perfectly objectively measurable, turn out to hinge as much on subjective observations as do the audience’s efforts to figure out exactly what Heisenberg and Bohr talked about in Copenhagen in 1941.

Humanity’s resumption of centrality in the universe as posited by Heisenberg and Bohr could not have offered the old cardinal much comfort. Copenhagen shows a homocentric universe that is less objective, less predictable, and less comforting than Galileo’s heliocentric or acentric universe. At the beginning of the characters’ first “draft” of the 1941 meeting, Heisenberg describes a “painfully familiar” sensation: “A mixture of self-importance and sheer helpless absurdity—that all of the 2,000 million people in this world, I’m the one who’s been charged with this impossible responsibility...” (p. 12). Heisenberg recognizes that the existence of those 2,000 million people depends acutely on his choices, not only his choice (if he really chose) to build or not build a nuclear bomb for Germany, but even more on his daily choice to live, observe, and interact with the world.

As Margrethe observes, the Copenhagen Interpretation makes everything personal. Speaking of Heisenberg’s motives for pursuing an academic chair at Leipzig, she tells Heisenberg and Bohr,

...you want to make everything seem heroically abstract and logical. And when you tell the story, yes, it all falls into place, it all has a beginning and a middle and an end. But I was there, and when I remember what it was like I’m there still, and I look around me and what I see isn’t a story! It’s confusion and rage and jealousy and tears and no one knowing what things mean or which way they’re going to go (p. 73).

Galileo, Heisenberg, and Bohr all promulgated new scientific ideas that disrupted the Western worldview. While this disruption wrought by scientists may be disquieting, it need not lead to the moral chaos explicitly warned of by characters in Galileo and implicitly suggested in the conversation of Heisenberg, Bohr, and Margrethe in Copenhagen. Science offers society many practical benefits. Just like the two plays discussed here, science also challenges society by offering metaphors that humanity may use to understand the meaning of its existence. The danger lies in taking those metaphors too seriously. Yes, scientific principles of Galileo, Heisenberg, and Bohr work as metaphors to some extent. We may view Galileo’s scientific method and the Copernican model of the solar system as reminders of the fallibility of our common sense. We may compare ourselves to photons and find splendid examples of unknowability and duality.

However, metaphors only work so long as the readers or viewers understand them fully. The uncertainty principle, for example, should be interpreted to suggest that knowledge is impossible. As Frayn himself indicates in his postscript to Copenhagen, Heisenberg did not outlaw certainty. He only discovered a relationship that limits “the simultaneous measurement of ‘canonically conjugate variables’, such as position and momentum....” Yet even that relationship provides a “precisely formulable” ratio that quantifies the uncertainty in any experimental measurement (p.98). A society that thinks Heisenberg is shouting, “You can know nothing!” is getting its science wrong.

Furthermore, at some crucial point, scientific metaphors for the human, moral universe break down. The removal of the earth from the center of the universe does not make all humans and human action insignificant. The inseparability of experimenter and experiment does not render everything subjective, unknowable, and open to interpretation. Science may produce practical gadgets and engaging metaphors, but, as Brinton (1959) points out, “science does not provide what the moralist as well as the theologian has to call ends, goals, purpose.... [I]n itself science merely helps us do what we want to do, blow up Hiroshima or reconstruct it” (p. 279).

Perhaps that limitation of science is at the root of the ambivalent attitude modern society exhibits toward science and scientists. Scientists develop inventions that can help society (Galileo’s telescope and waterworks) or destroy it (the nuclear bomb). More importantly, though, no matter how much physical comfort they may provide, scientific ideas rarely provide easy emotional or intellectual comfort. Science refuses to answer society’s moral questions; in fact, it seems only to make those moral questions more difficult to address. Society may wish that scientists could determine formulas for moral decision-making just as they can determine formulas for the orbits of planets and electrons. Barring that, society may simply wish it could go back to a primitive existence in which science did not exist to constantly upset its superstitious but safe and stable worldviews. Science in itself, however, can offer neither option. Science simply exists to discover certain physical truths (or at least practical estimations) about the world. All of humanity retains the burdensome responsibility of deciding whether it wants those truths and what it will do with them.

Barzun, J. (2000). From dawn to decadence: 500 years of Western cultural life. New York: HarperCollins.

Brecht, B. (1947). Galileo. Charles Laughton, trans. In Gilbert, M., Klaus, C.H., and Field, B.S., Jr., eds. (1994). Modern contemporary drama. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Brinton, C. (1959). A history of Western morals. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World.

Frayn, M. (1998). Copenhagen. London: Methuen.

Kafatos, M., and Nadeau, R. (1990). The conscious universe: Part and whole in modern physical theory. New York: Springer-Verlag.

Pais, A. (1991). Niels Bohr’s times: In physics, philosophy, and polity. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Powers, T. (1993). Heisenberg’s war: The secret history of the German bomb. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Rose, P.L. (1998). Heisenberg and the Nazi atomic bomb project: A study in German culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Weart, S. (1988). Nuclear fear: A history of images. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Biography of Galileo Galilei from the Institute and Museum of the History of Science of Florence, Italy (available in English and Italian!)

Galileo's Notes on Motion -- e-images of Galileo's manuscripts

Galileo and the Inquisition -- info from student coursework at Rice University

Lyrics to the Indigo Girls' "Galileo"

Heisenberg and the Uncertainty Principle -- biography, history, and science exhibit by David C. Cassidy (one of the big-dog Heisenberg biographers), Hofstra University, and by the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics.

Uncertain history: Christianity Today article on the many competing historical views of Heisenberg and the Nazi atomic bomb (reactor?) project

"Heisenberg's Funhouse" -- utterly unrelated to the above material! A goofy online journal.