Face of Science at the End of the Twentieth Century‪.‬

In a recent essay the physicist Freeman Dyson tells us of a visit he made, many years ago, to see Durrenmatt's play The Physicists. The characters in the play are, in his words, "grotesque figures wearing the names of Newton, Einstein and Mobius." The action takes place "in a lunatic asylum" where the scientists are patients. In the first act they murder their nurses, and in the second are revealed as "secret agents in the pay of rival intelligence services." Dyson complained about the unreality of "these absurd creatures" to his friend Marcus Fierz, a fellow physicist who had accompanied him to the performance. "But don't you see?" said Fierz. "The whole point of the play is to show us how we look to the rest of the human race." ALLOWING for a certain dramatic licence, this play is true to the traditional "humanist" view of science as a destroyer and a subversive force. Another modern playwright, Vaclav Havel, has argued that science