Copenhagen - Michael Frayn [30]
Heisenberg Our conversation’s over.
Bohr Our great partnership.
Heisenberg All our friendship.
Margrethe And everything about him becomes as uncertain as it was before.
Bohr Unless … yes … a thought-experiment .… Let’s suppose for a moment that I don’t go flying off into the night. Let’s see what happens if instead I remember the paternal role I’m supposed to play. If I stop, and control my anger, and turn to him. And ask him why.
Heisenberg Why?
Bohr Why are you confident that it’s going to be so reassuringly difficult to build a bomb with 235? Is it because you’ve done the calculation?
Heisenberg The calculation?
Bohr Of the diffusion in 235. No. It’s because you haven’t calculated it. You haven’t considered calculating it. You hadn’t consciously realised there was a calculation to be made.
Heisenberg And of course now I have realised. In fact it wouldn’t be all that difficult. Let’s see .… The scattering cross-section’s about 6 × 10−24, so the mean free path would be … Hold on …
Bohr And suddenly a very different and very terrible new world begins to take shape …
Margrethe That was the last and greatest demand that Heisenberg made on his friendship with you. To be understood when he couldn’t understand himself. And that was the last and greatest act of friendship for Heisenberg that you performed in return. To leave him misunderstood.
Heisenberg Yes. Perhaps I should thank you.
Bohr Perhaps you should.
Margrethe Anyway, it was the end of the story.
Bohr Though perhaps there was also something I should thank you for. That summer night in 1943, when I escaped across the Sound in the fishing-boat, and the freighters arrived from Germany …
Margrethe What’s that to do with Heisenberg?
Bohr When the ships arrived on the Wednesday there were eight thousand Jews in Denmark to be arrested and crammed into their holds. On the Friday evening, at the start of the Sabbath, when the SS began their round-up, there was scarcely a Jew to be found.
Margrethe They’d all been hidden in churches and hospitals, in people’s homes and country cottages.
Bohr But how was that possible?—Because we’d been tipped off by someone in the German Embassy.
Heisenberg Georg Duckwitz, their shipping specialist.
Bohr Your man?
Heisenberg One of them.
Bohr He was a remarkable informant. He told us the day before the freighters arrived—the very day that Hitler issued the order. He gave us the exact time that the SS would move.
Margrethe It was the Resistance who got them out of their hiding-places and smuggled them across the Sound.
Bohr For a handful of us in one fishing smack to get past the German patrol-boats was remarkable enough. For a whole armada to get past, with the best part of eight thousand people on board, was like the Red Sea parting.
Margrethe I thought there were no German patrol-boats that night?
Bohr No—the whole squadron had suddenly been reported unseaworthy.
Heisenberg How they got away with it I can’t imagine.
Bohr Duckwitz again?
Heisenberg He also went to Stockholm and asked the Swedish Government to accept everyone.
Bohr So perhaps I should thank you.
Heisenberg For what?
Bohr My life. All our lives.
Heisenberg Nothing to do with me by that time. I regret to say.
Bohr But after I’d gone you came back to Copenhagen.
Heisenberg To make sure that our people didn’t take over the Institute in your absence.
Bohr I’ve never thanked you for that, either.
Heisenberg You know they offered me your cyclotron?
Bohr You could have separated a little 235 with it.
Heisenberg Meanwhile you were going on from Sweden to Los Alamos.
Bohr To play my small but helpful part in the deaths of a hundred thousand people.
Margrethe Niels, you did nothing wrong!
Bohr Didn’t I?
Heisenberg Of course not. You were a good man, from first to last, and no one could ever say otherwise. Whereas I …
Bohr Whereas you, my dear Heisenberg, never managed to contribute to the death of one single solitary person in all your life.
Margrethe Well, yes.
Heisenberg Did