I've just watched the PBS version of Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen. It recounts a version -- actually multiple versions -- of a historical collision between two particles in 1941. The particles, two men, the two key physicists of their generations, had already forever altered the known universe, with the accent on "known."
Niels Bohr (Steven Rea), a Danish theoretical physicist and Nobel Prize winner, worked together in 1920's Copenhagen with Werner Heisenberg (Daniel Craig), a younger German physicist with a more mathematical bent, shortly after Einstein's relativity theory had shattered human concepts of fixed reality by demonstrating that it all rather depended on where one was standing. In the wake of that revelation, Bohr and Heisenberg bounced theories and ideas on one another, arguing passionately for several years, yet developing a close father-son relationship at the highest levels of their rarefied field. Together, they developed the earliest forms of quantum mechanics, Bohr's brilliant but more general theories shaped by Heisenberg's meticulous mathematics. Another theory developed, in Heisenberg's mind, to critical mass in the late 1920's: his famous Uncertainty Principle. The shorthand description of the Principle (now, all you many physicists among my Devoted Readers, I won't get this perfectly, but it's the best I can do with my extremely limited grasp) is that an atomic particle cannot be observed without changing that particle. It takes a collision of two particles -- a photon striking an electron, the electron hitting another particle in the cloud chamber and leaving a trail, to reveal where the electron was. That collision will alter the course of both particles. We cannot know the fundamental location and qualities of matter without altering it. Heisenberg humbled the very field he served by demonstrating its limitations. And the limitations of what we know about anything.
Heisenberg returned to Germany amid great acclaim, eventually winning his own Nobel Prize. Then with the rise of Nazi power, he was at the outset of the war secretly appointed to head the Nazi research into atomic power. By 1941, Denmark was occupied by Germany, its citizens, including Bohr, a Jew, fearing eventual crackdown and deportation. At some risk and difficulty, Heisenberg returned to Copenhagen to meet with Bohr in September 1941. They went for a walk to talk privately. Bohr returned home suddenly, furious, and never spoke to his protege again. No one knows what was said during that conversation. Great speculation existed that Heisenberg was trying to determine from Bohr, who remained in touch with Allied scientists, whether Britain or America had a nuclear program. Heisenberg's later descriptions of the meeting were rather unclear, but his main point was that he wanted Bohr to know that the Germans had such a program, that he, Heisenberg, was at its helm, and that as the two key scientists in the field, they had an obligation to slow down the process on both sides so that a nuclear bomb could not be made for use in combat. However, there was almost certainly an element of Oedipal bragging, of the son showing the father his greater power. Heisenberg could not have been authorized to reveal the German atomic secrets, and probably would have been executed if it was known that he had done so. Bohr never publicly told his version of the meeting.
In the event, Heisenberg proceeded slowly but steadily for the Nazis, building a reactor to produce the necessary plutonium. The fine points of the bomb itself were never realized by the Nazis before they were defeated. Heisenberg was denounced as a Nazi stooge and spy and was isolated from the scientific world thereafter. In 1943, Bohr escaped Denmark and went to work on the Manhattan Project. At Los Alamos, he contributed the theory (again, he was a big idea guy, but not into fine tuning) that developed into the trigger for the bomb.
The play Copenhagen tries to answer the question of what happened between the two men that night.
Whew. That's a lot of exposition, and it nearly derails the first half of the play. But if you bear with it, all these collisions, all the uncertainty, all the moral questions start repeating and reflecting and as one nucleus explodes, other ideas and shifting realities trigger more and more until there is a critical mass of understanding. Like the theories the men worked on, they go over and over the events of the evening, getting closer and closer to the truth. The play, as is fitting, raises more questions than it answers. If there is one overarching message out of all the glittering particles of this demanding work, it would come back to the Uncertainty Principle. Freyn in the Epilogue to the DVD says his point was to show how unknowable our own positions and reasons and plans and purposes can be to ourselves, until we collide with another person, and then that person's reactions and trajectory tells us about ourselves, at least who we used to be. I also felt, and this was never stated explicitly, but it follows as a corollary, that our own moral compass or path is unknown to us until we are deflected. We know ourselves best when we have erred, when we have strayed.
After the collision in Copenhagen, 1941, both men strayed. Bohr, the moral absolutist, ended up actually being part of the creation of the worst weapon known to man. And yet everyone who ever knew him said he was a kindly father-confessor, deeply caring. Heisenberg, reviled as a Nazi collaborationist, a man who had compromised his highest principles for the safety and security of a life in his homeland, was by no means a freedom fighter, part of the Resistance, there was no Schindler's list for him. Heisenberg produced just enough progress to keep the Nazis on the slow track. They were, by the time of Germany's defeat, very very close. For some reason, he never performed a certain calculation necessary to the creation of the bomb, a calculation so basic that afterward other physicists were mystified. He may not have known, himself, why he failed.
Whether Freyn's play accurately recounts actual events (and he makes no claim that it does), it is a brilliant puzzle, a moral and psychological conundrum of what we can and cannot know.
P.S. I confess I rented this just because I have a Daniel Craig fetish.
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