(2002) Can we ever have absolute knowledge of anyone's intentions; are we capable of discerning our own motives? The positivist Heisenberg, who in Margrethe's words wanted "to be understood when he couldn't understand himself," admits Wittgenstein-like: "There are things that can't be said."

A prologue and an epilogue accompany director/writer Howard Davies's adaptation for television of Michael Frayn's stage production (Tony Award in 2000 for Best Play), a dramatized attempt at imagining the final meeting of minds between theoretical physicists Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr in September 1941 at the Bohrs' home in Copenhagen of Nazi-occupied Denmark, in which the playwright describes his work - along with comments and remembrances from physicist Michio Kaku, two of Heisenberg's children, Barbara Blum and Jochen Heisenberg, and an assistant to Bohr, Erik Rudinger - and the drafts of Bohr's unsent letter to Heisenberg, which only came to light after the play had been written and performed.

In prefacing the film, Frayn points out Heisenberg's uncertainty principle - we can never obtain total knowledge of physical objects because of randomness at the core of reality - at play within the psychology of his characters. Though Heisenberg had become the one in charge of Germany's atomic-research program, he may not have sympathized at all with the Nazis, who had undermined theoretical physics because of the Jews, such as Einstein and Bohr, who brought it forth.

Friends and colleagues for twenty years, the Danish Bohr (Stephen Rea), 55, and the German Heisenberg (Daniel Craig), 39, who haven't seen each other for two years, are on opposite sides in the war. Alerted to Werner's coming to pay them a visit, Niels and his wife Margrethe (Francesca Annis) question the purpose of his coming to see them at this highly fraught time. The mystery is in the answer to this question.

The couple compare ledger-like the paradoxes and contradictions, the complementarity (wave/particle, friend/enemy) of receiving him into their home: his being like a son to Niels versus possible appearance to others of their collaborating with the enemy or having Niels's brain picked on nuclear fission (but Niels doesn't believe nuclear fission can be used to create a weapon) versus possible repercussions from authorities. When Margrethe dismisses Heisenberg as a "white Jew" in the eyes of the Nazis, Niels reminds her that Werner continued teaching relativity in the face of official opposition.

Feeling a mixture of fear and self-importance, Heisenberg arrives shadowed by the Gestapo, anxiously expressing concern about the way his friends have been treated - "any difficulties?" - before becoming more cautious of sensitivities and not wanting to jump to any conclusions.

The two scientists, having high regard for each other - Bohr's great insight that quantum theory applied to matter as well as energy in 1913 later combined with Heisenberg's mathematics of quantum mechanics - try to stick to physics (speaking in plain language rather than differential equations), but Heisenberg repeatedly blunders into the minefield of politics, raising Bohr's ire, remarking on his country's being "wantonly and cruelly overrun," sarcastically suggesting that Margrethe might sew a yellow star onto his jacket before they go off skiing or that they accept invitations from the German embassy to watch the deportations of undesirables.

In a dinner discussion of their former exploits on the ski slopes, where Werner had excelled, Niels sardonically makes an analogy to Heisenberg's famous principle: "At least I knew where I was. At the speed you were going, you were up against the uncertainty relationship. If you knew where you were when you were down, you didn't know how fast you'd got there. If you knew how fast you'd been going, you didn't know you were down."

With people, Heisenberg reflects, having been reminded by Bohr of his having on their first contact been criticized by a cheeky student that his mathematics was wrong: "one and one can add up to so many different sums," knowing that two of the Bohrs' six children had died tragically in an accident.

The two men go out for a stroll, to walk and talk as they had in years past, when they'd collaborated for their best work; but Niels returns to the house abruptly and angrily with Werner curtly saying his farewells. Margrethe asks what happened: "Politics?" "Physics," answers Niels.

The three return to the vacant rooms of the house in Copenhagen long after their last conversation and the war as shades - Niels died in 1962, Werner in 1976, Margrethe in 1984 - to discuss what had happened, what Bohr had replied to Heisenberg, and why Werner had come to see them, setting off a chain reaction of painful truths.

Werner, who says he'd been explaining and defending himself for thirty years - "Hands that had actually built the bomb wouldn't touch mine" - is obliged by the Bohrs, who like others had taken the wrong path of assumptions, to make four "drafts" of his intentions: "What I was going to say was treasonable." Heisenberg had begun by asking Bohr if a physicist has the moral right to work on "the practical exploitation of atomic energy."

In response to Niels's accusation that the purpose of Heisenberg's work would be to provide a homicidal maniac with a weapon of mass destruction, Werner said that by his having control of the atomic-research program would eventually, after the government had used up valuable resources, put himself and Bohr as scientists in a position to decide whether or not the difficulties could be surmounted in time: "The choice is in our hands."

Margrethe counters that Werner had been afraid of failure if he were given the resources. "I wasn't trying to build a bomb," protests Heisenberg, insisting that nevertheless he fully grasped the physics and "the darkness inside the human soul": "I understood. I didn't tell the others." But Bohr came to a different conclusion: "You think I have contacts with the Americans."

In the aftermath, Heisenberg, who never contributed to anyone's death, reminds his friends that the original intent was to drop the bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to which Bohr made some technical contributions, on Germany, his home with his family and children. The lost child had come to find his father, to recapture "those three years together," but Margrethe, possessing the more objective vantage point, broke into their nostalgic reverie by pointing out that during their great partnership they actually achieved those wondrous discoveries "far better apart."

To Werner (for whom "sense is mathematics") she says: "You wanted to make everything heroically abstract and logical." Heisenberg at the center of the universe had come, she believes, to show off his "lofty moral independence."

After Bohr's softly confirming (while Heisenberg plays a Schubert sonata at the piano as Margrethe looks on) that not only does quantum mechanics work beautifully, he says: "Not to exaggerate but we turned the world inside out…. We put man back at the center of the universe." For after being dwarfed while Newton and his Platonistic descendents built "the great new cathedrals for us to wonder at - the laws of classical mechanics that predate us from the beginning of eternity, that will survive us to eternity's end, that exist whether we exist or not" - along came Einstein.

Heisenberg assents: "It starts with Einstein. He shows that measurement - measurement, on which the whole possibility of science begins - measurement is not an impersonal event that occurs with impartial universality. It's a human act, carried out from a specific point of view in time and space, from one particular viewpoint of a possible observer. Then here in Copenhagen in those three years in the mid-twenties we discover that there is no precisely determined universe. That universe exists only as a series of approximations. Only within the limits determined by our relationship with it. Only through the understanding lodged inside the human head."

In her book, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, Rebecca Goldstein writes: "the playwright Michael Frayn not only correctly presents the physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg as rejecting the idea that physics is descriptive of an objective physical reality, but he also inaccurately identifies Einstein's relativity theory as the first of modern physics' moves in the direction of that ultimate rejection." Rather, Goldstein emphatically states: "The work of Gödel and Einstein - acknowledged by all as revolutionary and dubbed with those suggestive names - is commonly grouped together with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, as among the most compelling reasons modern thought has given us to reject the 'myth of objectivity.' This interpretation of the triadic grouping is itself part of the modern - or, more accurately, postmodern - mythology."

Finally, I'll add a comment by Peter Russell from his book, From Science to God: "If all that we ever know are the sensory images that appear in our minds, how can we be sure there is a physical reality behind our perceptions? Is it not just an assumption?... Yes, it is an assumption; nevertheless, it seems a plausible one."

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