Abstract
In Michael Frayn’s 1998 play, Copenhagen, complementarity works not only as an extended metaphor but also as a topic of discussion for the characters. These fictional versions of Niels and Margrethe Bohr and Werner Heisenberg work through unsatisfactory explanations for their motivations, increasing uncertainty about the reason for and content of their meeting during the Second World War. Rather than fulfilling the hope shared by these characters, the play shows that their effort—the building up of an incomplete picture from multiple frames of reference—and the preservation of uncertainty are what allow the play to end with a more complicated definition of justice than that with which it began and with the suggestion that this more-complicated justice has been obtained.
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Notes
- 1.
Carpenter is careful to qualify his statement in relationship to the criteria delimiting his archive of nuclear dramas; he has ascribed dates to plays in accordance with their initial performances, but he includes in his survey only plays which had been published (before his own book’s appearance in 2000).
- 2.
This is not at all to say that it doesn’t fit Carpenter ’s criteria; it does, but its main energy drives the play in a very different direction.
- 3.
The historical Heisenberg’s approach to this explanation is somewhat elliptical. His emphases in this line tend to dwell more on the general technical difficulties, which were presented as directing his (and Germany’s) work toward the development of a nuclear reactor rather than toward a nuclear bomb. See David C. Cassidy ’s discussions in Uncertainty (Chapter 26, “Reconstructing,” 501–522) and in Beyond Uncertainty (Chapters 28 and 29, “Explaining the Project: Farm Hall ” and “Explaining the Project: The World,” 369–389). The latter book, as Cassidy explains, “draws upon, yet in many ways transcends,” the former (7). The sheer volume of newly available materials was a significant influence in Cassidy’s decision to revisit, revise, and “transcend” his biography of Heisenberg .
- 4.
On this point the play, as it often does, makes reference to an actual publication: Niels Bohr and John Archibald Wheeler. “The Mechanism of Nuclear Fission.” Physical Review 56.5 (1 September 1939): 426–450.
- 5.
As Robert L. King has argued, Copenhagen’s characters are “the heirs of [Waiting for Godot’s] Didi and Gogo,” and they “play roles […] as reenactments of actual events [and] the playacting teaches a form of objectivity” (174). As scientists, Bohr and Heisenberg make themselves subjects of their own study, buying for themselves a certain alienation from themselves, a vantage point from which to assess their own behaviors and motivations, King suggests.
- 6.
As Frayn emphasizes in his postscript to the play, “All the alternative and co-existing explications offered in the play, except perhaps the final one, have been aired at various times, in one form or another” (95). Frayn is at no pains to give rhetorical emphasis to the sounder of these expositions; he explicitly claims a dramatist’s license even as he has been criticized for relying too closely on Thomas Powers ’ Heisenberg’s War. As Karen Barad has noted, though the play does not pretend to resolve the uncertainty surrounding the historical facts, many critics have sought to obtain from Frayn a sense of his responsibility to those facts. She writes, “even with the emergence of new historical evidence that flies in the face of Frayn’s reconstruction, he remains resolutely unrepentant. In response to his critics, he insists that he doesn’t feel any obligation to hold himself responsible to the historical facts” (9). Frayn’s regular comparisons of his work with the work of historians, however, suggest just one source of ongoing animus.
- 7.
Though the wave-particle problem is not chiefly that in which Copenhagen addresses either complementarity or uncertainty , Bohr’s lecture on “Atomic Theory and Mechanics” (in which he introduces complementarity ) makes clear that this is the inciting problem for his theory (see The Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr [hereinafter PWNB] 1: 55–56).
- 8.
Later in the lecture Bohr acknowledges the difficulties involved in speaking of “observation ” with regard to quantum phenomena (67).
- 9.
In the course of this lecture several complementary pairs are mentioned, including particles and waves, position and momentum (or energy), and spatio-temporal description and causality .
- 10.
Unless otherwise indicated, from this point forward when writing of Heisenberg , Bohr , and Margrethe , I mean Frayn’s characters rather than their historical counterparts.
- 11.
The characters’ flexibility to stage these thought experiments is facilitated by the play’s staging: three chairs and a bare stage, with minimal variations in the lighting effects. The absence of contextual markers aids such quick shifts as when Margrethe is suddenly rhetorically shrunken to a nucleus—something millions of millions of millions of times smaller than she is.
David Barnett and others have remarked on the tension between the set’s barren and closed lack of specificity and the converse liveliness and specificity of the play’s performers (particularly in the opening production at London’s National Theatre) (146). Barnett considers that this dichotomy furthers the “postdramatic” potentials of the play.
- 12.
The staging for the London premier included “seating for part of the audience , who thus suggested a tribunal in some afterlife where the dead may be finally judged” (Bilson 27).
- 13.
“What did he say,” in several similar articulations, occurs again on pages 34, 35, 36, and 38.
- 14.
In a late iteration of this meeting, each of the characters experiences himself or herself as a ghostly smile invisible from his or her own point of view (87).
- 15.
For a lengthy and accessible introductory treatment of quantum physics, focusing on the metaphysics which have been associated with the field, see Nick Herbert, Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics, in which Herbert writes, “Einstein called ψ a Gespensterfeld or ghost field. Since it carries no energy, the wave function is also referred to as an empty wave. In France, the ψ wave is called by a beautiful name—densité de presence, or ‘presence density’” (96).
- 16.
Karen Barad has critiqued Frayn’s use of this incident “for the purpose of layering Bohr with every (un)-imaginable kind of life-and-death responsibility”(14). Barad’s focus is not only the incompassion inherent in choosing such an event but more broadly Frayn’s rhetorical inconsistency in arguing on Heisenberg’s behalf for a suspension of judgment (based on the thesis that we cannot have enough knowledge of his motivations to make a fair judgment) while repeatedly offering Bohr up for indictment throughout the play.
- 17.
See Barad 16–17 for a concise and compelling critique of Frayn’s use of such rhetorical shifts in this passage and elsewhere.
- 18.
Derrida insists that the gap that prevents decidability is not a lack of knowledge (an uncertainty ) but rather an interruption “between one’s knowledge and the decision ” (“Ethics” 298). The “interruption” bestows ethical urgency, it creates undecidability, and this temporal break in “the chain of consequence” gives the ethical or political decision spatiality (“Ethics” 298).
- 19.
August W. Staub has also compared the play’s structure not only to Schrödinger’s thought experiment but also to the multiple frames of reference at work in Einstein’s relativity . His article draws a number of comparisons between the ideas of early twentieth-century physics and the form and content of Copenhagen .
- 20.
Margrethe says, “Some questions remain, long after their owners have died. Lingering like ghosts. Looking for the answers they never found in life” (3).
- 21.
Margrethe specifically refers to the unanswered questions (about what happened at that meeting, and why the meeting happened at all) as “ghosts” (3).
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Halpin, J.G. (2018). Torn Palimpsest and Recycled Time: Copenhagen and Conclusion. In: Contemporary Physics Plays. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75148-1_5
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