Thanksgiving Break
Thanksgiving break started at 5pm on Friday for me. I’m staying here at Stanford seeing as none of my family is at home in Raleigh. It’s ok though. I took Friday night and most of Saturday off. Took Nader to the airport, finished some errands, and have been working primarily on my EE 214 term project. It’s going to take a lot of work.
I re-read one of my favorite works of literature yesterday — Copenhagen, by Michael Frayn. Some of you know that this one of the works assigned in Honors 201 class, freshman year. Some of the more humanities-focused classmates didn’t appreciate it, but I thought it was absolutely brilliant. In my sophomore year, UNC Playmakers put on a production of Copenhagen at Chapel Hill, and I was fortunate to see it live. While I was studying abroad, I visited the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and took a stroll around Faelled Park, where Bohr and Heisenberg would often walk and talk.
So yeah. I’m a major fan. In high school I read through Brian Greene’s very accessible The Elegant Universe and was enjoying physics as my favorite class. I read about physicists like Richard Feynman and learned about all the science being done during the first third of our century. So when I came upon Copenhagen, I already had a familiarity with the (laymans) physics and the characters.
Copenhagen is a play that I love to pick up and truly read; if just to mouth the words and roll the dialog around my head. Copenhagen is about famous meeting between Niels Bohr (a half-Jewish Danish physicist) and his former apprentice Werner Heisenberg, a German. The year is 1941, and Denmark is occupied. These two worked together in the early 1920s and through their collaboration emerged two pillars of quantum mechanics — the complimentarity principle and the uncertainty principle. After this fateful meeting this one night in 1941, their relationship forever ended. What was said? What transpired? Frayn draws upon historical sources and indeed, the afterword of the play is nearly as many pages as the play itself and is where Frayn outlines the various historians and interpretations of the events.
I love this play because of the questions it evokes and makes me wonder. About the interminableness of our memories. About ethics. About decision making. About what it means to be a scientist. As the play unfolds, the mind races with the possibilities that are presented — what if Bohr hadn’t stormed off when Heisenberg asked him that critical question? Would Heisenberg then realized his earlier miscalculation? The tantalizing coincidences and happenstances that occurred regarding the competing atom bomb projects…the Allies estimating the required amount of U-235 to be hundred times less than what Hiroshima needed, thus making them more eager, while the Germans estimating it to be hundreds of times more than needed, thus making them reluctant. The ethics — how scientists who helped build the bomb at Los Alamos refused to shake Heisenberg’s hand when he visited after the war. The unending questions — was Heisenberg trying to subtly intentionally sabotage the Nazi atom bomb project? Or was his physics wrong?
As you might guess, I could go on like this for many more pages. I would love to transcribe some wonderful passages from the play. Absolutely delightful. Note to interested readers: you don’t have to know anything about physics to appreciate it. This play won the Tony Award in 2002.
I went into the City today to see a film, called Heima, about Sigur Ros‘ Icelandic concert tour. Despite getting there half an hour early, the line was so long they had run out of capacity. Note: don’t go to a film screening when the venue is a club that is being converted into a screening room.
Win Said,
November 20, 2007 @ 11:48 am
Saket, you look so young and innocent in that picture. My, how things have changed!
Donny Katz Said,
November 21, 2007 @ 6:59 am
agreeing with Win
also wanted to tell you I’m glad to hear your thoughts on this play. the only other opinion i’ve ever heard was from my friend travis, who had to read the play as an RA at Lehigh because it was the required reading of the incoming freshman class when he was RAing. in summary, he burned the book in a fire after reading it.
so now i’ve heard both sides ha! glad to hear what the play really had to offer and i’ll try to pick it up someday
Saket Said,
November 21, 2007 @ 7:12 pm
Oh no! That’s awful…how could you burn it. I’m trying to remember some of the complaints from my class. For people who never cared for physics or science in general, I can certainly see why they would not care about this play. A big part of the play is the nature of scientific discovery — all the nebulous paths and directions and understandings and reasonings that we engage in in our quest to describe the world around us. The politics that can creep into the scientific process….the emotions.
Another complaint I recall is that this a play told in a linear traditional narrative fashion. The premise is that the three characters (Bohr, Heisenberg, and Bohr’s wife Margrethe) come together after they are long and dead to revisit the question, to talk and think about it and try to come to a resolution. They will reminisce about their past, about the different places where they were. I dunno, I immediately understood what Frayn was doing and didn’t have any problem with it. Others complained “where is heisenberg now? is he on a train? is he dead? is he alive? what year is it in this paragraph?”
that’s the genius of it…one can argue that Frayn incorporated the ideas of complementarity and uncertainty into the very structure of his play!
I explore this idea in a paper I wrote for the class, found here: http://www.saketvora.com/papers/srvora_study_of_uncertainty.pdf