Over fifty years have passed since C. P. Snow observed a crucial divide between practitioners and scholars in the arts and sciences; however, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, far from the isolated "two cultures" he perceived, the dialogue between science and literature has been well established. The past ten years have seen an increase in plays overtly incorporating complex scientific issues as subject matter, eliciting comparisons between the goals and methods of scientific inquiry and dramatic writing. These "science plays" engage issues ranging from biology and mathematics to quantum physics and medicine, using to varied effect a wide range of characters, structures, and styles.
Plays such as Bertolt Brecht's Life of Galileo, Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Physicists, Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, David Auburn's Proof, and Caryl Churchill's A Number have caught the attention of both scientists and the theatre-going public around the world. They demonstrate the possibility of bridging the gap between specialists and the layperson, and creating theatre that is both scientifically complex and dramatically appealing.
Michael Frayn's recent play Copenhagen provides an ideal example for examining the wide realm of possibilities, benefits, and dangers of combining the two disciplines in dramatic literature. Frayn tells the story of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, close friends and pioneers in the field of quantum physics in the early twentieth century. Heisenberg, a German, and Bohr, a Danish Jew, found themselves on opposite sides of World War II, racing to create the first workable nuclear weapons. Copenhagen dramatizes a mysterious 1941 encounter between the two men, at the height of the war, in Copenhagen. Scholars, historians, and scientists still debate the details of that meeting, but the result of it was the near-dissolution of the powerful friendship between teacher and student. Using theories attributed to them, such as the uncertainty and complementarity principles, Frayn attempts to reconstruct that meeting in the presence of Bohr's wife, Margrethe. The three characters discover that human thoughts and motivation can be as elusive as subatomic particles, and the audience witnesses the worlds of science and drama in pursuit of the similar goal of discovering the truth.
What Copenhagen and other science plays demonstrate is both the extent and limits of understanding human beings through the scope of science and literature. The combination of the two disciplines into these "science plays" proves mutually beneficial, as drama discovers powerful new subject matter and science uses the medium as a teaching device.