If you discovered something that could change the world, but with a potential for dramatic abuse, what should you do? Pretend you didn't find it, maybe even cover your tracks so that others can't follow? Tell people all about it, damn the consequences, as information should be free? Maybe something intermediate: record it, but lock in away in some vault, in case you might need it in the future? What would be better for you? What would be better for everyone?
Not the kind of decision most of us think about every day, but society would likely be better were that not the case. More pointedly, chemical and nuclear weapons, the advertising industry, surveillance technology, modern opioids, and the attention-maximizing algorithms of social media are among the discoveries that come most easily to mind when thinking of massive consequential downsides, and revolutionary new developments like gene editing or the contemporary form of "artificial intelligence" have the potential to trend that way as well. Should their inventors have buried such work, or at least kept it from being released to the world at large?
The Physicists (1964) is a dark tragicomedy, written in the thick of the Cold War, that tries to explore this issue in dramatic form. Dürrenmatt is a philosophically-minded Swiss playwright who was among the best-known proponents of , an artistic movement that aimed to make the audience think about the being presented, rather than just identifying with a character. Unsurprisingly, many writers of epic theater were politically motivated, especially Bertolt Brecht, its most famous adherent. is not overtly political, but its focus on physicists is a deliberate choice, as it is the intellectual responsibility of the profession that is played for its effect.
