Earthlings On Fire!(I dont want knowledge!I want certainty!)
An Earthling On Fire!
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I don't want knowledge, I want certainty!
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"In the sharp formulation of the law of causality-- "if we know the present exactly, we can calculate the future"-it is not the conclusion that is wrong but the premise. "
--Heisenberg, in Uncertainty Principle paper, 1927
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Excerpts from Michael Frayn's play "Copenhagen":
Copenhagen plot: Pioneers of Quantum Physics Werner Heinsenberg( German),Neils Bohr(Dutch) and his wife Margarethe are having aftherdeath meeting somewhere in Heaven(or Hell?) during which they passionatly discuss their friendship that was shaken by the ww2,their collaboration on Quantum Theory and Heinsenberg's work on German Nuclear Project.The main subject of conversation is their mysterious 1941 Copenhagen meeting after which Americans started working on Atomic Bomb.Although the possibilities of creation of Atomic Bomb were not disscused during the meeting becouse it was monitored by german intelligence,the concerns of allies were raised due to the famous Heinsenberg's question to Bohr:"Is it ethical for a physicists to work on development of a new weapon during the war?" This sentence might have determined the history of the world.
1.
(In this excerpt Bohr and Heinsenberg discuss their work on Quantum Mechanics,it's philosophical implications and their friendship.Frayn skillfuly and artisticlly plays with Complementarity and Uncertainty,basic tenets of Quantum Mechanics.)
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Bohr: Yes, and you stayed behind in Copenhagen. ..
Heisenberg :And started to think at last.
Margrethe: You're a lot better off apart, you two.
Heisenberg:Having him out of town was as liberating as getting away from my hay fever on Heligoland.
Margrethe: I shouldn't let you sit anywhere near each other, if I were the teacher.
Heisenberg: And that's when I did uncertainty. Walking round Faelled Park on my own one horrible raw February night. It's very late, and as soon as I've turned off into the park I'm completely alone in the darkness. I start to think about what you'd see, if you could train a telescope on me from the mountains of Norway. You'd see me by the street lamps on the Blegdamsvej, then nothing as I vanished into the darkness, then another glimpse of me as I passed the lamp-post in front of the bandstand. And that's what we see in the cloud chamber. Not a continuous track but a series of glimpses - a series of collisions between the passing electron and various atoms of water vapour.... Or think of you, on your great papal progress to Leiden in 1925. What did Margrethe see of that, at home here in Copenhagen? A picture postcard from Hamburg, perhaps. Then one from Leiden. One from Gottingen. One from Berlin. Because what we see in the cloud chamber are not even the collisions themselves, but the water-droplets that condense around them, as big as cities around a traveller - no, vastly bigger still, relatively - complete countries - Germany... Holland... Germany again. There is no track, there are no precise addresses; only a vague list of countries visited. I don't know why we hadn't thought of it before, except that we were too busy arguing to think at all.
Bohr: You seem to have given up on all forms of discussion. By the time I get back from Norway I find you've done a draft of your uncertainty paper and you've already sent it for publication!
Margrethe: And an even worse battle begins.
Bohr: My dear good Heisenberg, it's not open behaviour to rush a first draft into print before we've discussed it together! It's not the way we work!
Heisenberg: No, the way we work is that you hound me from first thing in the morning till last thing at night! The way we work is that you drive me mad!
Bohr: Yes, because the paper contains a fundamental error.
Margrethe: And here we go again.
Heisenberg: No, but I show him the strangest truth about the universe that any of us has stumbled on since relativity - that you can never know everything about the whereabouts of a particle, or anything else, even Bohr now, as he prowls up and down the room in that maddening way of his, because we can't observe it without introducing some new element into the situation, an atom of water vapour for it to hit, or a piece of light - things which have an energy of their own, and which therefore have an effect on what they hit. A small one, admittedly, in the case of Bohr . . .
Bohr: Yes, if you know where I am with the kind of accuracy we're talking about when we're dealing with particles, you can still measure my velocity to within - what . . .?
Heisenberg: Something like a billionth of a billionth of a kilometre per second. The theoretical point remains, though, that you have no absolutely determinate situation in the world, which among other things lays waste to the idea of causality, the whole foundation of science - because if you don't know how things are today you certainly can't know how they're going to be tomorrow. I shatter the objective universe around you - and all you can say is that there's an error in the formulation!
Bohr: There is!
Margrethe: Tea, anyone? Cake?
Heisenberg: Listen, in my paper what we're trying to locate is not a free electron off on its travels through a cloud chamber, but an electron when it's at home, moving around inside an atom...
Bohr: And the uncertainty arises not, as you claim, through its indeterminate recoil when it's hit by an incoming photon. . .
Heisenberg: Plain language, plain language!
Bohr: This is plain language.
Heisenberg: Listen...
Bohr: The language of classical mechanics.
Heisenberg: Listen! Copenhagen is an atom. Margrethe is its nucleus. About right, the scale? Ten thousand to one?
Bohr :Yes, yes.
Heisenberg: Now, Bohr's an electron. He's wandering about the city somewhere in the darkness, no one knows where. He's here, he's there, he's everywhere and nowhere. Up in Faelled Park, down at Carlsberg. Passing City Hall, out by the harbour. I'm a photon. A quantum of light. I'm despatched into the darkness to find Bohr. And I succeed, because I manage to collide with him.... But what's happened? Look - he's been slowed down, he's been deflected! He's no longer doing exactly what he was so maddeningly doing when I walked into him!
Bohr: But, Heisenberg, Heisenberg! You also have been deflected! If people can see what's happened to you, to their piece of light, then they can work out what must have happened to me! The trouble is knowing what's happened to you! Because to understand how people see you we have to treat you not just as a particle, but as a wave. I have to use not only your particle mechanics, I have to use the Shrodinger wave function... 
Heisenberg :I know - I put it in a postscript to my paper.
Bohr: Everyone remembers the paper - no one remembers the postscript. But the question is fundamental. Particles are things, complete in themselves. Waves are disturbances in something else.
Heisenberg I know. Complementarity. It's in the postscript.
Bohr:They're either one thing or the other. They can't be both. We have to choose one way of seeing them or the other. But as soon as we do we can't know everything about them.
Heisenberg: And off he goes into orbit again. Incidentally exemplifying another application of complementarily. Exactly where you go as you ramble around is of course completely determined by your genes and the various physical forces acting on you. But it's also completely determined by your own entirely inscrutable whims from one moment to the next. So we can't completely understand your behaviour without seeing it both ways at once, and that's impossible. Which means that your extraordinary peregrinations are not fully objective aspects of the universe. They exist only partially, through the efforts of me or Margrethe, as our minds shift endlessly back and forth between the two approaches.
Bohr You've never absolutely and totally accepted complementarity, have you? 
Heisenberg:Yes! Absolutely and totally! I defended it at the Como Conference in 1927! I have adhered to it ever afterwards with religious fervour! You convinced me. I humbly accepted your criticisms.
Bohr: Not before you'd said some deeply wounding things.
Heisenberg: Good God, at one point you literally reduced me to tears!
Bohr: Forgive me, but I diagnosed them as tears of frustration and rage.
Heisenberg: I was having a tantrum?
Bohr: I have brought up children of my own.
Heisenberg: And what about Margrethe? Was she having a tantrum? Klein told me you reduced her to tears after I'd gone, making her type out your endless redraftings of the complementarity paper.
Bohr: I don't recall that.
Margrethe: I do.
Heisenberg: We had to drag Pauli out of bed in Hamburg once again to come to Copenhagen and negotiate peace.
Bohr: He succeeded. We ended up with a treaty. Uncertainty and complementarity became the two central tenets of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.
Heisenberg A political compromise, of course, like most treaties.
Bohr: You see? Somewhere inside you there are still secret reservations.
Heisenberg: Not at all - it works. That's what matters. It works, it works, it works!
Bohr: It works, yes. But it's more important than that. Because you see what we did in those three years, Not to exaggerate, but we turned the world inside out! Yes, listen, now it comes, now it comes....We put man back at the centre of the universe. Throughout history we keep finding ourselves displaced. We keep exiling ourselves to the periphery of things. First we turn ourselves into a mere adjunct of God's unknowable purposes, tiny figures kneeling in the great cathedral of creation. And no sooner have we recovered ourselves in the Renaissance, no sooner has man become, as Protagoras proclaimed him, the measure of all things, than we're pushed aside again by the products of our own reasoning!- We're dwarfed again as physicists build the great new cathedrals for us to wonder at - the laws of classical mechanics that predate us from the beginning of eternity, that will survive us to eternity's end, that exist whether we exist or not. Until we come to the beginning of the twentieth century, and we're suddenly forced to rise from our knees again.
Heisenberg:It starts with Einstein.
Bohr: It starts with Einstein. He shows that measurement - measurement, on which the whole possibility of science depends - measurement is not an impersonal event that occurs with impartial universality. It's a human act, carried out from a specific point of view in time and space, from the one particular viewpoint of a possible observer. Then, here in Copenhagen in those three years in the mid twenties we discover that there is no precisely determinable objective universe. That the universe exists only-as a series of approximations. Only within the limits determined by our relationship with it. Only through the understanding lodged inside the human head.
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Earthlings on fire!
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2.
(In this part of the Play Heinsenberg and Bohr are talking about Heinsenberg's involment in German Nuclear Project,his "mistake" in calculations for the amount of plutonium needed to start a Chain Reaction and deportation of talented Jewish physicists from Germany during ww2. )
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Bohr And that's why you were so confident you couldn't do it until you had the plutonium. Because you spent the entire war believing that it would take not a few kilograms of 235, but a ton or more. And to make a ton of 235 in any plausible time. .
Heisenberg Would have needed something like two hundred million separator units. It was plainly unimaginable.
Bohr If you'd realised you had to produce only a few kilograms . . .
Heisenberg Even to make a single kilogram would need something like two hundred thousand units.
Bohr But two hundred million is one thing; two hundred thousand is another. You might just possibly have imagined setting up two hundred thousand.
Heisenberg Just possibly.
Bohr The Americans did imagine it.
Heisenberg Because Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls actually did the calculation. They solved the diffusion equation.
Bohr Frisch was my old assistant.
Heisenberg Peierls was my old pupil.
Bohr An Austrian and a German
Heisenberg So they should have been making their calculation for us, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. But instead they made it at the University of Birmingham, in England
Margrethe Because they were Jews.
Heisenberg There's something almost mathematically elegant about that.
Bohr They also started with Perrin and Flügge.
Heisenberg They also thought it would take tons. They also thought it was unimaginable.
Bohr Until one day...
Heisenberg They did the calculation.
Bohr They discovered just how fast the chain reaction would go.
Heisenberg And therefore how little material you'd need.
Bohr They said slightly over half a kilogram.
Heisenberg About the size of a tennis ball.
Bohr They were wrong, of course.
Heisenberg They were ten times under.
Bohr Which made it seem ten times more imaginable than it actually was.
Heisenberg Whereas I left it seeming twenty times less imaginable.
Bohr So all your agonising in Copenhagen about plutonium was beside the point. You could have done it without ever building the reactor. You could have done it with 235 all the time.
Heisenberg Almost certainly not.
Bohr Just possibly, though.
Heisenberg Just possibly.
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Earthlings On Fire!
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3.
(This excerpt is from the end of the play.Frayn closes the play with the historical Uncertainty in determination of Heinsenberg's motives for his involment in German Nuclear Programm and his intentions in initiating 1941 Copenhagen meeting with Bohr -Was there a delibarate or accidental mistake in Heisenberg's crucial calculations needed to build A-bomb?Was Heinsenberg trying to warn Bohr during their Copenhagen meeting of german intentions to create an Atomic Bomb?What might have happened if Germany got the bomb?Whatever his motives were,Heinsenberg did not built the bomb,but Bohr contributed to the construction of one on the part of the allies.The end of the play shows the art playing once more with scientific concept of Heinsenberg's Uncertainty Principle)
Heisenberg Meanwhile you were going on from Sweden to Los Alamos.
Bohr To play my small but helpful part in the deaths of a hundred thousand people.
Margrethe Niels, you did nothing wrong!
Bohr Didn't I?
Heisenberg Of course not. You were a good man, from first to last, and no one could ever say otherwise. Whereas I...
Bohr Whereas you, my dear Heisenberg, never managed to contribute to the death of one single solitary person in all your life.
Margrethe Well, yes.
Heisenberg Did I?
Margrethe One. Or so you told us. The poor fellow you guarded overnight, when you were a boy in Munich, while he was waiting to be shot in the morning.
Bohr All right then, one. One single soul on his conscience, to set against all the others.
Margrethe But that one single soul was emperor of the universe, no less than each of us. Until the morning came.
Heisenberg No, when the morning came I persuaded them to let him go.
Bohr Heisenberg, I have to say - if people are to be measured strictly in terms of observable quantities . . .
Heisenberg Then we should need a strange new quantum ethics. There'd be a place in heaven for me. And another one for the SS man I met on my way home from Haigerloch. That was the end of my war. The Allied troops were closing in; there was nothing more we could do. Elisabeth and the children had taken refuge in a village in Bavaria, so I went to see them before I was captured. I had to go by bicycle - there were no trains or road transport by that time - and I had to travel by night and sleep under a hedge by day, because all through the daylight hours the skies were full of Allied planes, scouring the roads for anything chat moved. A man on a bicycle would have been the biggest target left in Germany. Three days and three nights I travelled. Out of Württemberg, down through the Swabian Jura and the first foothills of the Alps. Across my ruined homeland. Was this what I'd chosen for it? This endless rubble? This perpetual smoke in the sky? These hungry faces? Was this my doing? And all the desperate people on the roads. The most desperate of all were the SS. Bands of fanatics with nothing left to lose, roaming around shooting deserters out of hand, hanging them from roadside trees. The second night, and suddenly there it is - the terrible familiar black tunic emerging from the twilight in front of me. On his lips as I stop - the one terrible familiar word. 'Deserter,' he says. He sounds as exhausted as I am. I give him the travel order I've written for myself. But there's hardly enough light in the sky to read by, and he's too weary to bother He begins to open his holster instead. He's going to shoot me because it's simply less labour. And suddenly I'm thinking very quickly and clearly - it's like ski- ing, or that night on Heligoland, or the one in Faelled Park. What comes into my mind this time is the pack of American cigarettes I've got in my pocket. And already it's in my hand - I'm holding it out to him. The most desperate solution to a problem yet. I wait while he stands there looking at it, trying to make it out, trying to think his left hand holding my useless piece of paper, his right on the fastening of the holster. There are two simple words in large print on the pack: Lucky Strike. He closes the holster, and takes the cigarettes instead.... It had worked, it had worked! Like all the other solutions to all the other problems. For twenty cigarettes he let me live. And on I went. Three days and three nights. Past the weeping children, the lost and hungry children, drafted to fight, then abandoned by their commanders. Past the starving slave-labourers walking home to France, to Poland, to Estonia. Through Gammertingen and Biberach and Memmingen. Mindelheim, Kaufbeuren, and Schöngau. Across my beloved homeland. My ruined and dishonoured and beloved homeland.
Bohr My dear Heisenberg! My dear friend!
Margrethe Silence. The silence we always in the end return to.
Heisenberg And of course I know what they're thinking about.
Margrethe All those lost children on the road.
Bohr Heisenberg wandering the world like a lost child himself.
Margrethe Our own lost children.
Heisenberg And over goes the tiller once again.
Bohr So near, so near! So slight a thing!
Margrethe He stands in the doorway, watching me, then he turns his head away...
Heisenberg And once again away he goes, into the dark waters.
Bohr: Before we can lay our hands on anything, our life's over.
Heisenberg:Before we can glimpse who or what we are, we're gone and laid to dust.
Bohr: Settled among all the dust we raised.
Margrethe: And sooner or later there will come a time when all our children are laid to dust, and all our children's children.
Bohr: When no more decisions, great or small, are ever made again. When there's no more uncertainty, because there's no more knowledge.
Margrethe: And when all our eyes are closed, when even the ghosts have gone, what will be left of our beloved world? Our ruined and dishonoured and beloved world?
Heisenberg: But in the meanwhile, in this most precious meanwhile, there it is. The trees in Faelled Park. Gammertingen and Biberach and Mindelheim. Our children and our children's children. Preserved, just possibly, by that one short moment in Copenhagen. By some event that will never quite be located or defined. By that final core of uncertainty at the heart of things.
posted by Vlada Jan @ 10:44 AM
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