Copenhagen - Michael Frayn [21]
Bohr On your behalf.
Heisenberg You invited Schrödinger here …
Bohr To have a calm debate about our differences.
Heisenberg And you fell on him like a madman. You meet him at the station—of course—and you pitch into him before he’s even got his bags off the train. Then you go on at him from first thing in the morning until last thing at night.
Bohr I go on? He goes on!
Heisenberg Because you won’t make the least concession!
Bohr Nor will he!
Heisenberg You made him ill! He had to retire to bed to get away from you!
Bohr He had a slight feverish cold.
Heisenberg Margrethe had to nurse him!
Margrethe I dosed him with tea and cake to keep his strength up.
Heisenberg Yes, while you pursued him even into the sickroom! Sat on his bed and hammered away at him!
Bohr Perfectly politely.
Heisenberg You were the Pope and the Holy Office and the Inquisition all rolled into one! And then, and then, after Schrödinger had fled back to Zürich—and this I will never forget, Bohr, this I will never let you forget—you started to take his side! You turned on me!
Bohr Because you’d gone mad by this time! You’d become fanatical! You were refusing to allow wave theory any place in quantum mechanics at all!
Heisenberg You’d completely turned your coat!
Bohr I said wave mechanics and matrix mechanics were simply alternative tools.
Heisenberg Something you’re always accusing me of. ‘If it works it works.’ Never mind what it means.
Bohr Of course I mind what it means.
Heisenberg What it means in language.
Bohr In plain language, yes.
Heisenberg What something means is what it means in mathematics.
Bohr You think that so long as the mathematics works out, the sense doesn’t matter.
Heisenberg Mathematics is sense! That’s what sense is!
Bohr But in the end, in the end, remember, we have to be able to explain it all to Margrethe!
Margrethe Explain it to me? You couldn’t even explain it to each other! You went on arguing into the small hours every night! You both got so angry!
Bohr We also both got completely exhausted.
Margrethe It was the cloud chamber that finished you.
Bohr Yes, because if you detach an electron from an atom, and send it through a cloud chamber, you can see the track it leaves.
Heisenberg And it’s a scandal. There shouldn’t be a track!
Margrethe According to your quantum mechanics.
Heisenberg There isn’t a track! No orbits! No tracks or trajectories! Only external effects!
Margrethe Only there the track is. I’ve seen it myself, as clear as the wake left by a passing ship.
Bohr It was a fascinating paradox.
Heisenberg You actually loved the paradoxes, that’s your problem. You revelled in the contradictions.
Bohr Yes, and you’ve never been able to understand the suggestiveness of paradox and contradiction. That’s your problem. You live and breathe paradox and contradiction, but you can no more see the beauty of them than the fish can see the beauty of the water.
Heisenberg I sometimes felt as if I was trapped in a kind of windowless hell. You don’t realise how aggressive you are. Prowling up and down the room as if you’re going to eat someone—and I can guess who it’s going to be.
Bohr That’s the way we did the physics, though.
Margrethe No. No! In the end you did it on your own again! Even you! You went off skiing in Norway.
Bohr I had to get away from it all!
Margrethe And you worked out complementarity in Norway, on your own.
Heisenberg The speed he skis at he had to do something to keep the blood going round. It was either physics or frostbite.
Bohr Yes, and you stayed behind in Copenhagen …
Heisenberg And started to think at last.
Margrethe You’re a lot better off apart, you two.
Heisenberg Having him out of town was as liberating as getting away from my hay fever on Heligoland.
Margrethe I shouldn’t let you sit anywhere near each other, if I were the teacher.
Heisenberg And that’s when I did uncertainty. Walking round Faelled Park on my own one horrible raw February night. It’s very late, and as soon as I’ve turned off into the park I’m completely