Copenhagen - Michael Frayn [1]
Margrethe Something alien about him, even then.
Bohr So quick and eager.
Margrethe Too quick. Too eager.
Bohr Those bright watchful eyes.
Margrethe Too bright. Too watchful.
Bohr Well, he was a very great physicist. I never changed my mind about that.
Margrethe They were all good, all the people who came to Copenhagen to work with you. You had most of the great pioneers in atomic theory here at one time or another.
Bohr And the more I look back on it, the more I think Heisenberg was the greatest of them all.
Heisenberg So what was Bohr? He was the first of us all, the father of us all. Modern atomic physics began when Bohr realised that quantum theory applied to matter as well as to energy. 1913. Everything we did was based on that great insight of his.
Bohr When you think that he first came here to work with me in 1924 …
Heisenberg I’d only just finished my doctorate, and Bohr was the most famous atomic physicist in the world.
Bohr … and in just over a year he’d invented quantum mechanics.
Margrethe It came out of his work with you.
Bohr Mostly out of what he’d been doing with Max Born and Pascual Jordan at Göttingen. Another year or so and he’d got uncertainty.
Margrethe And you’d done complementarity.
Bohr We argued them both out together.
Heisenberg We did most of our best work together.
Bohr Heisenberg usually led the way.
Heisenberg Bohr made sense of it all.
Bohr We operated like a business.
Heisenberg Chairman and managing director.
Margrethe Father and son.
Heisenberg A family business.
Margrethe Even though we had sons of our own.
Bohr And we went on working together long after he ceased to be my assistant.
Heisenberg Long after I’d left Copenhagen in 1927 and gone back to Germany. Long after I had a chair and a family of my own.
Margrethe Then the Nazis came to power .…
Bohr And it got more and more difficult. When the war broke out—impossible. Until that day in 1941.
Margrethe When it finished forever.
Bohr Yes, why did he do it?
Heisenberg September, 1941. For years I had it down in my memory as October.
Margrethe September. The end of September.
Bohr A curious sort of diary memory is.
Heisenberg You open the pages, and all the neat headings and tidy jottings dissolve around you.
Bohr You step through the pages into the months and days themselves.
Margrethe The past becomes the present inside your head.
Heisenberg September, 1941, Copenhagen .… And at once—here I am, getting off the night train from Berlin with my colleague Carl von Weizsäcker. Two plain civilian suits and raincoats among all the field-grey Wehrmacht uniforms arriving with us, all the naval gold braid, all the well-tailored black of the SS. In my bag I have the text of the lecture I’m giving. In my head is another communication that has to be delivered. The lecture is on astrophysics. The text inside my head is a more difficult one.
Bohr We obviously can’t go to the lecture.
Margrethe Not if he’s giving it at the German Cultural Institute—it’s a Nazi propaganda organisation.
Bohr He must know what we feel about that.
Heisenberg Weizsäcker has been my John the Baptist, and written to warn Bohr of my arrival.
Margrethe He wants to see you?
Bohr I assume that’s why he’s come.
Heisenberg But how can the actual meeting with Bohr be arranged?
Margrethe He must have something remarkably important to say.
Heisenberg It has to seem natural. It has to be private.
Margrethe You’re not really thinking of inviting him to the house?
Bohr That’s obviously what he’s hoping.
Margrethe Niels! They’ve occupied our country!
Bohr He is not they.
Margrethe He’s one of them.
Heisenberg First of all there’s an official visit to Bohr’s workplace, the Institute for Theoretical Physics, with an awkward lunch in the old familiar canteen. No chance to talk to Bohr, of course. Is he even present? There’s Rozental … Petersen, I think … Christian Moller, almost certainly .… It’s like being in