THE COPENHAGEN PAPERS: AN INTRIGUE. (book review)

American Theatre, October, 2001 by Wren, Celia

by Michael Frayn and David Burke, Metropolitan Books, New York. 129 pages, $20 cloth.

QUANTUM MECHANICS SHOULD BE banned as a leitmotif for writers. The weighty allusion to the Uncertainty Principal; the existential abysses provoked by the Observership Problem; the pregnant paradox of light, which is both particle and wave--enough already! After several decades of milking this paradigm for all the metaphor it's worth, it is time for the literary community to find a new scientific touchstone. The Human Genome era, for example, has just begun.

So it's a relief to report that The Copenhagen Papers--co-written by Michael Frayn, who authored Copenhagen, and David Burke, who acted in the British production of that play--takes its physics lessons a...

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