Copenhagen

My friend said I must see the play Copenhagen. I don't have many gifts or callings, but this one I have. When I'm told to read, see, listen-to, experience something I try very hard to do so.

And so, I planted myself into the chairs at IRT for a Sunday matinee (drowning out the voices of ticket scalpers offering me bargain basement prices for the Colts / Giants game which had just kicked off as I walked in).

The play is about two physicists, Bohr and Heisenberg, the first a Dane and the second a German, and Bohr's wife (who was his secretary and life-long assistant). Bohr and Heisenberg worked closely together through the 20's and 30's and then were separated by the war. But they had one mysterious meeting in the middle of the war, in Copenhagen during the autumn of 1943.

This play takes place is the nether-world after they have all passed on and meet again to review their stories, the context that led up to their meeting and all of the ramifications of their discussion.

Three big issues were raised that I want to discuss: 1) the interplay between our memory, our own notion of self-identify, and "history," 2) how discoveries in physics contributed to the rise in humanism and 3) the possible historical ramification of sabotaging an atomic program.

You can demonstrate the existence and position of a particle not by observing the particle itself, but by observing phenomenon that can only be attributed to the particle's existence. You can't see the particle but you can see the light emitted when the particle collides with something else. When you see the light you know that the particle must have existed at that point because of the reaction.

And the play contends that is how we know ourselves. We know ourselves based on how people respond to ourselves. In fact, the playwright (Michael Frayn) flirts with the notion that we cannot see ourselves at all and the only way we can know ourselves is to judge the reactions of others.

That notion is intermixed with the idea that an observation of an object affects that object's behavior.

I think that in a way it is that way with people.

If you set out to get to know me you could make some headway by watching me, interviewing me, studying my life. But I suspect you would glean much more information by evaluating the relationships around me. By studying my impact on others (my friends, my family, my coworkers) I imagine that you'd get a much more accurate and much more complete picture of who I really am. There seems to be something nearly poetic about that, observing my life like a particle--bouncing off of all of these people and events that I collide with, giving off heat and light at every intersection.

Towards the end of the play the characters were discussing how all of those new discoveries placed man back where he belonged, in the center of the universe. And then one asked a pointed question: "if man is the center of the universe and man creates a machine capable of destroying all of mankind and then indeed does so, what is left?"

And the logical answer was profoundly simple. If humanity is the chief end of the universe and humankind is destroyed we are left with nothing. Darkness.

Clearly I wouldn't place man at the center of the universe. But I wonder, does this conclusion even allow us to suggest that we do so? Can something central to the existence and meaning of the universe be capable of destroying itself and rendering the rest of history (such that it would be) meaningless?

(Tangent: Could God willfully destroy himself?)

Finally, the playwright asserts that Heisenberg subconsciously and yet nearly deliberately short-circuited Germany's development of atomic weapons by never questioning some underlying assumptions that he took to be unsolvable. The implication is that had he not done so Germany would have developed the atom bomb and used it somewhere in Western Europe: London, or Paris, or Copenhagen. And the words placed in Heisenberg are clearly accusatory as he wonders about the reality that Germany didn't think an atomic bomb could be built, but the Allies built one and used it.

Within the dialogue of the play this reality is continually and tacitly mentioned as if the lives lost in Nagasaki and Hiroshima were totally unnecessary. I'm just not so sure about some of those logical extensions. I'm no fan of nuclear weapons (or war in general), but it is impossible to say how many lives would have been lost had the Allies not ended the war in the Pacific when they did. And in the play Heisenberg is allowed to continue to pontificate about that fact without ever truly being held accountable for being part of a German nation that allowed millions to be exterminated.

And this is where the human economies of war begin to make me tremble and ache. How do we compare the approximately 200,000 atomic victims in Japan to the millions of genocide victims in Germany? And we'll never know how many more would have died had the war continued or the had the outcome been different.

I truly wish we hadn't have used those weapons. But I think we are all naive to believe that any outcome would have been "better" in terms of lives lost had we not. And someone somewhere would have been the first to use an atomic or nuclear weapon in battle. What if it had been Nazi Germany? Or China? Or North Korea?

I wish these beasts weren't part of our reality, but I personally am not willing to look back and ignorantly judge those who used them as if our reality now would be radically better had they decided differently.

Here are some links I've come across as I wrote this:
Background info on the play Copenhagen from the Seattle University Department of Physics
The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - About.com
Holocaust overview from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum