Copenhagen - Michael Frayn [37]
The problem with Heisenberg is his elusiveness and ambiguity, which is of course what the play is attempting to elucidate. The one thing about him that everyone agreed upon was what Max Born, his mentor in Göttingen, called ‘his unbelievable quickness and precision of understanding.’ The contrast with Bohr is almost comic. ‘Probably [Bohr’s] most characteristic property,’ according to George Gamow, ‘was the slowness of his thinking and comprehension.’
As a young man Heisenberg seems to have had an appealing eagerness and directness. Born described him as looking like a simple farm boy, with clear bright eyes, and a radiant expression on his face. Somebody else thought he looked ‘like a bright carpenter’s apprentice just returned from technical school.’ Victor Weisskopf says that he made friends easily, and that everyone liked him. Bohr, after their first meeting in 1922, was delighted by Heisenberg’s ‘nice shy nature, his good temper, his eagerness and his enthusiasm.’ There was something about him of the prize-winning student, who is good at everything required of him, and Bohr was not the only father-figure to whom he appealed. He had a somewhat similar relationship to Sommerfeld, his first professor in Munich, and in his difficulties with the Nazis he turned to two elders of German physics for counsel, Max Planck and Max von Laue. His closest friend and colleague was probably Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, who was younger than him, but it is striking that during his internment the person he chose to confide his explanation of the Hiroshima bomb to was not Weizsäcker, who was interned with him (although he may well have discussed it with him already), but the 66-year-old Otto Hahn.
The American physicist Jeremy Bernstein says that ‘he had the first truly quantum-mechanical mind—the ability to take the leap beyond the classical visualizing pictures into the abstract, all-but-impossible-to-vizualise world of the subatomic …’ Cassidy believes that a great part of his genius was his ‘ability to adopt a serviceable solution regardless of accepted wisdom.’ Rudolf Peierls stresses his intuition. He would ‘almost always intuitively know the answer to a problem, then look for a mathematical solution to give it to him.’ The obverse of this, according to Peierls, is that ‘he was always very casual about numbers’—a weakness that seems to have contributed to his downfall—or his salvation—in the atomic bomb programme.
Margrethe always found him difficult, closed, and oversensitive, and this propensity to be withdrawn and inturned was exacerbated as life went on—first by his political problems in the thirties, and then by his efforts to reconcile the moral irreconcilables of his wartime work. His autobiographical writing is rather stiff and formal, and his letters to Bohr, even during the twenties and thirties, are correct rather than intimate. Throughout the period of their closest friendship they addressed each other with the formal Sie, and switched to du only when Heisenberg also had a chair.
The conversations that Heisenberg claimed such freedom to recreate in his memoirs are stately. Much more plausibly colloquial is the transcript of David living’s long interview with him for The Virus House, living’s history of the German bomb programme, though he is still (naturally) watchful. In the transcripts of the relatively unguarded conversations that the German atomic team had among themselves during their internment, where Heisenberg emerges as the dominant figure, both morally and practically, a certain hard-headed worldliness can be detected. He is much concerned with professional prospects, and with how they might make some money out of their wartime researches. When one of the others says that if they agree to work on atomic matters under Allied control they will be looked down upon as traitors ‘in the eyes of the masses’, Heisenberg replies: ‘No. One must do that cleverly. As far as the masses are concerned it will look as though we unfortunately have to continue our scientific work