When historical fiction is more truthful than historical fact

September 2014 BBC News

A point of view: When historical fiction is more truthful than historical fact

Fiction has the power to fill in the imaginative gaps left by history, writes Lisa Jardine.

For some time I have been researching the lives of a group of scientists who worked on the development of the atomic bomb during World War Two. Although there are several impeccably researched non-fiction works on the subject and a number of biographies, none of these really conveyed to me the emotions and convictions that drove their work - I simply could not connect with the personal principles of the scientists who collaborated with such energy to produce the period's ultimate weapon of mass destruction.

In my search for understanding the motivation of those who joined the race to produce the bomb whose use at Hiroshima and Nagasaki appalled the world, I eventually decided to turn from fact to fiction. If historians could not fill the gaps in the record that made the knowledge I was after so elusive, perhaps storytellers less shackled by documented evidence might do so.

• Lisa Jardine is professor of Renaissance studies at University College, London, where she is director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Humanities

Eventually I found myself rereading the text of Michael Frayn's much-celebrated 1998 stage work, Copenhagen. It recreates a famous moment in the history of the race to develop the atomic bomb - a meeting in 1941, in Denmark, between German physicist Werner Heisenberg - best known for his "uncertainty principle", that the more accurately you know the position of a particle, the less accurately you know its velocity, and vice versa - and his former doctoral supervisor and mentor, the Danish quantum theorist Niels Bohr. 

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