Isn't it a little odd that the Australian actor Russell Crowe, who last year played the part of a pretty violent gladiator, and a couple of years before that played a pretty violent detective, should show up this year playing the part of a mathematician overcoming mental illness with the help of the woman he loves?

It demonstrates the extent to which science has become an acceptable subject in popular culture. Where this trend began is hard to pinpoint - perhaps with the publication some 20 years ago years ago of a range of books like Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics and Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters. These were books that linked modern particle physics - quantum mechanics - and eastern philosophy.

Quantum mechanics is science's greatest achievement. It is a hodgepodge of rules for the behaviour of very small particles which turns everything you thought you knew about science on its ear, and underpins most of the major scientific advances - molecular biology, DNA and genetic engineering are three notable examples - of the 20th Century. Eastern philosophy underwent a renaissance about 20 years ago, and the combination of the two was pretty compelling.

Science got its biggest shot in the arm from Stephen Hawking, whose 1988 book A Brief History of Time has sold something like 9 million copies and has been translated into three dozen languages, despite being difficult to read.

Now, all of a sudden, the public has a huge appetite for science. Consider these random facts: Amazon.com's Science book listings these days are almost as extensive as its Food book listings.

Hawking's new book, The Universe in a Nutshell, was published in November. Last week, it was reported to have been on the New York Times bestseller list for 13 weeks. It was then number ten and climbing.

Do a search on the name Pierre Fermat on the Internet and you'll find nearly 30 books about this 17th Century French judge and amateur mathematician's Last Theorem. If you're interested, he conjectured that the Pythagorean theorem (a squared + b squared = c squared) is never true for any other whole number power (e.g. a cubed + b cubed would never equal c cubed in any case). He never told anyone what the solution he boasted of having discovered was, and mathematicians have been trying to rediscover it for 350 years.

A professor at Princeton University managed to find a proof ten years ago, touching off a frenzy of writing. There is a book on the shelves at the moment called Wittgenstein's Poker, written by British journalists David Edmonds and John Eidinow. It examines a ten-minute argument at Cambridge University in the late 1940s between two eminent philosophers, Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein. It seeks to answer this question: did Mr Wittgenstein get so angry at Mr Popper that he threatened him with a poker? The blurb describes the book as "Ivory Tower drama at its crackling best".

Readers seem to have felt that was a little bit of an exaggeration. But what really is Ivory Tower drama at its crackling best is a debate raging around our ears at this very moment, one that has inspired books, and a Tony Award-winning Broadway play, Copenhagen, written by Michael Frayn.

At the centre of the debate is whether Werner Heisenberg, the Nobel prize-winning physicist who led a team working to build an atomic bomb in Hitler's Nazi Germany deliberately thwarted the research out of a desire to shield the world from its consequences.

Before the Second World War began, Heisenberg was the protegee of another Nobel prize-winning phsyicist, the Dane Niels Bohr. When war broke out, Heisenberg went to work for Hitler's government. Bohr lived quietly for most of the war in occupied Denmark.

In 1941, Heisenberg went to Copenhagen to visit Bohr. It was certainly a difficult meeting, cut short by Bohr. But why Heisenberg went in the first place, and what information passed between the two men, is a matter of great controversy. Towards the end of the war, to escape arrest by the German authorities, Bohr escaped from Europe and went to the United States, where he took part in the successful American atomic programme. After the war, Heisenberg portrayed himself to the author of Brighter Than a Thousand Suns, a history of the atomic bomb, as a kind of scientific resistance hero who had sabotaged the German atomic programme to save mankind from its consequences.

He said he had told Bohr at their meeting in Copenhagen of his qualms. If these assertions are true, he was the ultimate resistance fighter, and the world owes him much. But there is another side to the story, which has been given dramatic impetus by the release of some of Bohr's papers at the beginning of this month by the Bohr family. They had intended to keep the documents secret until 50 years after Bohr's death, which occurred in 1962. They said that the interest generated by Frayn's play had persuaded them to release them ten years earlier than they had intended. (Anyone who wants to read the documents can find them on the Internet at http://www.nbi.dk/NBA/papers. ) Bohr drafted, but apparently did not send, letters to Heisenberg taking him to task for his self-serving version of events. Bohr claims that far from expressing reservations about what he and his team were doing, Heisenberg boasted of his work, saying the war would surely be ended by the use of atomic weapons by Germany.

But the documents that have now been made public have to be read in the knowledge that all of them were written at least 16 years after the events they purport to describe.

Which version is the truth?

My money's on Bohr.

My guess would be that after the War, Heisenberg was a man who was humiliated by his failure to produce an atomic weapon, and by his former teacher's involvement with the American team, who did, and whose story of having deliberately thrown the race was really little more than an excuse for failure.

But Michael Frayn isn't changing a line of his play. After all, he points out, in the end Heisenberg didn't kill anyone with atomic or any other weapons. But Bohr, rightly or wrongly, did contribute to the deaths of thousands of people through his involvement with the Allied atomic bomb programme.