Free Copenhagen by Michael Frayn Page A

actually be doing it. Yes?
    Heisenberg   Swerve left, swerve right, or think about it and die.
    Bohr   But after you’ve done it …
    Margrethe   You look back and make a guess, just like the rest of us. Only a worse guess, because you didn’t see yourself doing it, and we did. Forgive me, but you don’teven know why you did uncertainty in the first place.
    Bohr   Whereas if you’re the one at the centre of the universe …
    Margrethe   Then I can tell you that it was because you wanted to drop a bomb on Schrödinger.
    Heisenberg   I wanted to show he was wrong, certainly.
    Margrethe   And Schrödinger was winning the war. When the Leipzig chair first became vacant that autumn he was short-listed for it and you weren’t. You needed a wonderful new weapon.
    Bohr   Not to criticise, Margrethe, but you have a tendency to make everything personal.
    Margrethe   Because everything is personal! You’ve just read us all a lecture about it! You know how much Heisenberg wanted a chair. You know the pressure he was under from his family. I’m sorry, but you want to make everything seem heroically abstract and logical. And when you tell the story, yes, it all falls into place, it all has a beginning and a middle and an end. But I was there, and when I remember what it was like I’m there still, and I look around me and what I see isn’t a story! It’s confusion and rage and jealousy and tears and no one knowing what things mean or which way they’re going to go.
    Heisenberg   All the same, it works, it works.
    Margrethe   Yes, it works wonderfully. Within three months of publishing your uncertainty paper you’re offered Leipzig.
    Heisenberg   I didn’t mean that.
    Margrethe   Not to mention somewhere else and somewhere else.
    Heisenberg   Halle and Munich and Zürich.
    Bohr   And various American universities.
    Heisenberg   But I didn’t mean that.
    Margrethe   And when you take up your chair at Leipzig you’re how old?
    Heisenberg   Twenty-six.
    Bohr   The youngest full professor in Germany.
    Heisenberg   I mean the Copenhagen Interpretation. The Copenhagen Interpretation works. However we got there, by whatever combination of high principles and low calculation, of most painfully hard thought and most painfully childish tears, it works. It goes on working.
    Margrethe   Yes, and why did you both accept the Interpretation in the end? Was it really because you wanted to re-establish humanism?
    Bohr   Of course not. It was because it was the only way to explain what the experimenters had observed.
    Margrethe   Or was it because now you were becoming a professor you wanted a solidly established doctrine to teach? Because you wanted to have your new ideas publicly endorsed by the head of the church in Copenhagen? And perhaps Niels agreed to endorse them in return for your accepting his doctrines. For recognising him as head of the church. And if you want to know why you came to Copenhagen in 1941 I’ll tell you that as well. You’re right—there’s no great mystery about it. You came to show yourself off to us.
    Bohr   Margrethe!
    Margrethe   No! When he first came in 1924 he was a humble assistant lecturer from a humiliated nation, grateful to have a job. Now here you are, back in triumph—the leading scientist in a nation that’s conquered most of Europe. You’ve come to show us how well you’ve done in life.
    Bohr   This is so unlike you!
    Margrethe   I’m sorry, but isn’t that really why he’s here? Because he’s burning to let us know that he’s in charge ofsome vital piece of secret research. And that even so he’s preserved a lofty moral independence. Preserved it so famously that he’s being watched by the Gestapo. Preserved it so successfully that he’s now also got a wonderfully important moral dilemma to face.
    Bohr   Yes, well, now you’re simply working yourself up.
    Margrethe   A chain reaction. You tell one painful truth and it leads to