The film version of Michael Frayn's "Copenhagen" can be watched on line for free.

[NNadir]

It stars Daniel Craig as Heisenberg.

I used to own the DVD, but somehow it disappeared. I haven't seen it in many years.

The science is presented at a low level and in a fairly cutesy way - I doubt that a conversation between Bohr and Heisenberg involved the explanations of fission for the benefit of the popular audience - and one has to sit through, in the introduction, with the tiresome smug "wisdom" from Michio Kaku, he of the great haircut, but as art, the film's not too bad.

After the play was written and produced, it was discovered among the real Neils Bohr's papers, an account of the actual event that was not flattering to Heisenberg.

[LearnedHand]

1. Thank you for the link

I wanted to see this play but haven’t so far. lol about Michio Kaku’s good hair. I know he can be a bit kooky, but I really enjoyed the one book of his I read. Don’t remember which one it was though.

[NNadir]

3. I can't say I have any use for the guy, but that's just me. His whining about the Cassini mission removed all...

...credibility in my mind. He was being stupid about plutonium, and is still, from what I understand, stupid about nuclear technology in general. Kaku does have a cool haircut though.

A flaw in the film by the way is that it depicts Margarethe Bohr using the word plutonium in 1941 which is impossible, since the existence of plutonium was not known in 1941 in Denmark - it had only been identified on an atomic scale in early 1942 from experiments conducting in 1941 - and had definitely not been formally named by Seaborg. The code word for its existence was "49" a rather uninspiring and easily decipherable choice for element 94.

She certainly would not have known it was fissionable, nor would she understand that a reactor was required to make it, nor that it was a key to making a certain type of nuclear weapon.

Years ago, when I was at the Smithsonian, the original sample of plutonium (a few atoms on a metal target) was on display in the Museum of Science. I have no idea if it's still there.

[erronis]

4. Just finished watching. I enjoyed it but it might be a bit too "cerebral" for many.