Michael Frayn - Copenhagen

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Copenhagen: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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The Tony Award — winning play that soars at the intersection of science and art,
is an explosive re-imagining of the mysterious wartime meeting between two Nobel laureates to discuss the atomic bomb.
In 1941 the German physicist Werner Heisenberg made a clandestine trip to Copenhagen to see his Danish counterpart and friend Niels Bohr. Their work together on quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle had revolutionized atomic physics. But now the world had changed and the two men were on opposite sides in a world war. Why Heisenberg went to Copenhagen and what he wanted to say to Bohr are questions that have vexed historians ever since. In Michael Frayn’s ambitious, fiercely intelligent, and daring new play Heisenberg and Bohr meet once again to discuss the intricacies of physics and to ponder the metaphysical — the very essence of human motivation.

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Heisenberg Yes.

Margrethe Because you wouldn’t dream of giving up such a wonderful opportunity for research.

Heisenberg Not if I can possibly help it.

Margrethe Also you want to demonstrate to the Nazis how useful theoretical physics can be. You want to save the honour of German science. You want to be there to reestablish it in all its glory as soon as the war’s over.

Heisenberg All the same, I don’t tell Speer that the reactor …

Margrethe… will produce plutonium, no, because you’re afraid of what will happen if the Nazis commit huge resources, and you fail to deliver the bombs. Please don’t try to tell us that you’re a hero of the resistance.

Heisenberg I’ve never claimed to be a hero.

Margrethe Your talent is for skiing too fast for anyone to see where you are. For always being in more than one position at a time, like one of your particles.

Heisenberg I can only say that it worked. Unlike most of the gestures made by heroes of the resistance. It worked! I know what you think. You think I should have joined the plot against Hitler, and got myself hanged like the others.

Bohr Of course not.

Heisenberg You don’t say it, because there are some things that can’t be said. But you think it.

Bohr No.

Heisenberg What would it have achieved? What would it have achieved if you’d dived in after Christian, and drowned as well? But that’s another thing that can’t be said.

Bohr Only thought.

Heisenberg Yes. I’m sorry.

Bohr And rethought. Every day.

Heisenberg You had to be held back, I know.

Margrethe Whereas you held yourself back.

Heisenberg Better to stay on the boat, though, and fetch it about. Better to remain alive, and throw the lifebuoy. Surely!

Bohr Perhaps. Perhaps not.

Heisenberg Better. Better.

Margrethe Really it is ridiculous. You reasoned your way, both of you, with such astonishing delicacy and precision into the tiny world of the atom. Now it turns out that everything depends upon these really rather large objects on our shoulders. And what’s going on in there is …

Heisenberg Elsinore.

Margrethe Elsinore, yes.

Heisenberg And you may be right. I was afraid of what would happen. I was conscious of being on the winning side … So many explanations for everything I did! So many of them sitting round the lunch-table! Somewhere at the head of the table, I think, is the real reason I came to Copenhagen. Again I turn to look.… And for a moment I almost see its face. Then next time I look the chair at the head of the table is completely empty. There’s no reason at all. I didn’t tell Speer simply because I didn’t think of it. I came to Copenhagen simply because I did think of it. A million things we might do or might not do every day. A million decisions that make themselves. Why didn’t you kill me?

Bohr Why didn’t I …?

Heisenberg Kill me. Murder me. That evening in 1941. Here we are, walking back towards the house, and you’ve just leapt to the conclusion that I’m going to arm Hitler with nuclear weapons. You’ll surely take any reasonable steps to prevent it happening.

Bohr By murdering you?

Heisenberg We’re in the middle of a war. I’m an enemy. There’s nothing odd or immoral about killing enemies.

Bohr I should fetch out my cap-pistol?

Heisenberg You won’t need your cap-pistol. You won’t even need a mine. You can do it without any loud bangs, without any blood, without any spectacle of suffering. As cleanly as a bomb-aimer pressing his release three thousand metres above the earth. You simply wait till I’ve gone. Then you sit quietly down in your favourite armchair here and repeat aloud to Margrethe, in front of our unseen audience, what I’ve just told you. I shall be dead almost as soon as poor Casimir. A lot sooner than Gamow.

Bohr My dear Heisenberg, the suggestion is of course …

Heisenberg Most interesting. So interesting that it never even occurred to you. Complementarity, once again. I’m your enemy; I’m also your friend. I’m a danger to mankind; I’m also your guest. I’m a particle; I’m also a wave. We have one set of obligations to the world in general, and we have other sets, never to be reconciled, to our fellow-countrymen, to our neighbours, to our friends, to our family, to our children. We have to go through not two slits at the same time but twenty-two. All we can do is to look afterwards, and see what happened.

Margrethe I’ll tell you another reason why you did uncertainty: you have a natural affinity for it.

Heisenberg Well, I must cut a gratifyingly chastened figure when I return in 1947. Crawling on my hands and knees again. My nation back in ruins.

Margrethe Not really. You’re demonstrating that once more you personally have come out on top.

Heisenberg Begging for food parcels?

Margrethe Established in Göttingen under British protection, in charge of post-war German science.

Heisenberg That first year in Göttingen I slept on straw.

Margrethe Elisabeth said you had a most charming house thereafter.

Heisenberg I was given it by the British.

Margrethe Your new foster-parents. Who’d confiscated it from someone else.

Bohr Enough, my love, enough.

Margrethe No, I’ve kept my thoughts to myself for all these years. But it’s maddening to have this clever son forever dancing about in front of our eyes, forever demanding our approval, forever struggling to shock us, forever begging to be told what the limits to his freedom are, if only so that he can go out and transgress them! I’m sorry, but really.… On your hands and knees? It’s my dear, good, kind husband who’s on his hands and knees! Literally. Crawling down to the beach in the darkness in 1943, fleeing like a thief in the night from his own homeland to escape being murdered. The protection of the German Embassy that you boasted about didn’t last for long. We were incorporated into the Reich.

Heisenberg I warned you in 1941. You wouldn’t listen. At least Bohr got across to Sweden.

Margrethe And even as the fishing-boat was taking him across the Sound two freighters were arriving in the harbour to ship the entire Jewish population of Denmark eastwards. That great darkness inside the human soul was flooding out to engulf us all.

Heisenberg I did try to warn you.

Margrethe Yes, and where are you? Shut away in a cave like a savage, trying to conjure an evil spirit out of a hole in the ground. That’s what it came down to in the end, all that shining springtime in the 1920s, that’s what it produced — a more efficient machine for killing people.

Bohr It breaks my heart every time I think of it.

Heisenberg It broke all our hearts.

Margrethe And this wonderful machine may yet kill every man, woman, and child in the world. And if we really are the centre of the universe, if we really are all that’s keeping it in being, what will be left?

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