Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society

Review: "A Strange New Quantum Ethics"

Reviewed Work(s): Copenhagen by Michael Frayn
Review by: Jonothan Logan
Source: American Scientist, Vol. 88, No. 4 (JULY-AUGUST 2000), pp. 356-359
Published by: Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27858060
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 was, by his own lights, striving to do search is emblematic of the slippery
"the noble thing." slope that a generation of atomic scien
Bethe's resolution of his Trained as a physicist, Schweber is the tists have tried to navigate since Hiroshi
own moral dilemma first biographer to explain the signifi ma, with varying degrees of success. Ac
cance of the scientific work that Oppen cording to Schweber, Bethe believes that
concerning military heimer and Bethe did?a fascinating while each scientist is responsible for his
or her own individual actions, scientists
topic in itself, and one that most previ
research is emblematic ous biographers have tended to dismiss collectively have no right to refuse to
with so much hand-waving. work on weapons of mass destruction.
of the slippery s/cpe Because of his emphasis on the This credo would cause Bethe to first op
moral and the scientific, however, pose and then support development of
ti\w,i g*swa*io? Schweber sometimes gives short shrift the H-bomb, to support a nuclear test
atomic scientists hawe ban, to oppose Ronald Reagan's "Star
to or oversimplifies political events. By
depicting Oppenheimer as the "insid Wars" Strategic Defense Initiative and,
tried to navigate since er" and Bethe as the "outsider," for ex most recently (and perhaps inconsistent
ample, the author glosses over the key ly), to call for Los Alamos scientists to
Kirv?hjt-i?i, wit;! i/ivy*?g role that Bethe played as a member of "cease and desist" their work on im
degrees ?f SL'c ?f. the President's Science Advisory Com proving nuclear weapons.
mittee in the Eisenhower administra While the author's attitude toward his
tion. Likewise, the impression is that subject might be described as doting?
Bethe consistently opposed the hydro Bethe gave Schweber unrestricted access
gen bomb, whereas in reality his posi to his papers for this authorized biogra
tion was more complicated and nu phy?In the Shadow of the Bomb escapes
being hagiographical, if only because
anced: Initially opposed to development
of the super-bomb for moral reasons, Bethe himself is so disarmingly self
Bethe later returned to Los Alamos critical, ironically the answer that Bethe
during vacations from Cornell, and fol would give to an interviewer seeking an
lowing the Communist invasion of explanation for the physicist's turn
South Korea, he agreed to resume about on the H-bomb could serve as an
weapons work. Bethe later described epigraph for the story of the atomic sci
himself as the H-bomb's "midwife." entists: "It seemed quite logical. But
sometimes I wish I were more consis
Indeed, Bethe's resolution of his own
moral dilemma concerning military re tent an idealist." g

"A S if 3 ice :<2\k- Quasi tu it. B?hks"

Jonothan Logan
Copenhagen. Michael Frayn. 132 pp. run in London, do seem dazzled by the
Methuen Publishing Ltd., 2000. $10.95. heady counterpoint of history quantum
mechanics and postmodern epistemol
ogy electrifying the air between the
openhagen Tames Complexity of play's characters?Werner Heisenberg,
Science" was the title of a recent Niels Bohr and Bohr's wife Margrethe.
review of Michael Frayn's latest The play is quick, clever and artfully
play?meant, no doubt, as a compli plotted. What's disturbing is that
ment. Audiences in New York, where Copenhagen "tames" history, too, alter
the play opened in April after a long ing the facts and rearranging the moral
landscape the real Bohr and Heisenberg
inhabited.
Jonothan Logan, a physicist, first became acquaint
The subject of the play is Heisen
ed with the records of the German fission project
while archiving the papers of Samuel Goudsmit,
berg^ famous September 1941 visit to
leader of the Allied mission investigating the project Bohr in Nazi-occupied Denmark, an
in World War II. More on Heisenberg and the encounter the two men described very
atomic bomb can be found in Logan's article "The differently after the war. Bohr, accord
Critical Mass" (May-June 1996; http://www. ing to family members, perceived
amsci.org/amsci/articles/96articles/Logan-s.html). Heisenberg's visit as decidedly hostile,

356 American Scientist, Volume 88

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 In order to keep
alive the image of a
Heisenberg at odds with
the immorality around
him, Frayn conceals the
true contours of
Heisenberg's
accommodation to
the Nazi state.

Philip Bosco, Blair Brown and Michael Cumpsty as Niels Bohr, his wife, Margrethe, and
Werner Heisenberg in the Broadway production of Copenhagen. Photograph by Joan Marcus.

perhaps an attempt to pick his brain ontion of the play includes an expanded
postscript, from which we learn that
the subject of fission or a probe for in
formation on Allied research. Heisen Powers's book was the inspiration for
berg maintained (to the Swiss-German Frayn's play and was effectively its
journalist Robert Jungk) that he came sole source (Frayn's broad bibliography
simply to ask whether "as a physicist notwithstanding). The Powers book
one had the moral right to work on the won little respect from historians, as
practical exploitation of atomic ener Frayn acknowledges, but it is not hard
gy" and to offer reassurance that Ger to see why a playwright's professional
many was not building an atomic radar would have responded to the
bomb. But Bohr, he said, misunder book's fiction-enhanced intrigue.
stood his good intentions and became In Copenhagen, Heisenberg and Bohr
alarmed. The two conflicting versions are conceived as returning from be
yond death to reenact their tense
of the meeting encapsulate the 50-year
old controversy over Heisenberg's wartime meeting in a series of encoun
wartime work for Germany. ters, each a different imagining, or
Jungk expanded Heisenberg's ver "draft," of Heisenberg's purpose. Now
sion into a full-blown legend of heroic Heisenberg can try to convince Bohr of
resistance, Brighter Than a Thousand his good intentions, and Bohr can
Suns (1958), which celebrated the question and respond, all in a style
supposed fact that "German nuclear that recalls their brilliant collaboration
physicists, living under a saber-rattling at Bohr's institute in the 1920s, when
dictatorship, obeyed the voice of con together they explored the startling
science and attempted to prevent the implications of the new quantum
construction of atom bombs." Jungk laws. Margrethe, throughout, serves
himself later disavowed this thesis as a one-woman chorus, skeptical of
when new information came to light each of Heisenberg's drafts, distrust
(and Bohr, as Harvard historian Gerald ing his relentless need to impress and
Holton has discovered, composed? to win, trying to puncture the moral
but never mailed?a letter to Heisen pretensions she detects. We see the
berg objecting in strong terms to the virtuous version Heisenberg gave to
version of their visit Heisenberg had Jungk, and the Powers variation?that
related to Jungk). But a new version of Heisenberg had possessed but with
the resistance myth emerged in 1993 in held key knowledge of bomb physics:
Thomas Powers's "shadow history" of "I understood very clearly. I simply
the German atomic bomb project, didn't tell the others." Margrethe sug
Heisenbergs War. gests that his real object had been to
The revised edition of the text of obtain information about the Allies'
fission work and to persuade Bohr to
Copenhagen that was published recently
to coincide with the American produc discourage them.

2000 July-August 357

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 NANOVIEWS
Winning the Future, Gobi
Rambles, Teen Genes
The "engines" of Robert Buderi's
Engines of Tomorrow: How the
World's Best Companies Are Using
Their Research Labs to Win the
Future (Simon & Schuster, $27.50)
are intellectual, and both the his
torical narrative and analysis are
gripping. This wonderful story of
research in an industrial context is,
itself, the fruit of a prodigious
amount of research. Buderi cheers
the 90s' refocusing of resources,
and he allows that equilibrium has
not yet been reached and that the
future of fundamental research
may still be bright.
According to Tom Siegfried's
The Bit and the Pendulum: How
the New Physics of Information Is
Revolutionizing Science (Wiley,
$27.95), the computer has become
the same sort of "superparadigm"
for our understanding of the physi
cal world that clockwork was to
Newton. The conceptual payoff is
exciting. The words and tone will
give a teenager who has yet to take
a first physics course some sense of
quantum computing.
In Gobi: Tracking the Desert (Yale
University Press, $24.95), John Man
mixes the travel-writing spirit of
Peter Matthiessen and Bruce
Chatwin with his own wry sense of
humor to take us on a delightful
ramble through the Gobi desert.
Find out what a Mongolian does
when he looks after his horse, study
signs of the snow leopard, explore
the Nine Pots of the Sacred Mother
and come to appreciate a wilder
ness that is fading fast.
358 American Scientist, Volume 88
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The final and longest draft, Frayn's Einstein had employed to derive mean
favored invention, is staged to be the diffusion distances in Brownian mo
most compelling. More complexly tion. Mistaken but plausible, it yielded
heroic than in the Powers design, this a critical mass of tons, an amount still
Heisenberg has succeeded in fore vastly beyond what Germany could
stalling a Nazi atomic bomb, both by hope to produce. That Heisenberg had
withholding information about plutoni not formulated the full three-dimen
um from arms minister Albert Speer sional fission-diffusion equations is
and by refusing to interest himself in hardly the lapse Frayn's Bohr finds so
the most basic physics of atomic explo inexplicable. The real Heisenberg did
sives?specifically, by not calculating what working scientists do every day:
the critical mass for a bomb. Had he but He made a preliminary calculation,
allowed himself to pause and do so, the and when it yielded a mass so imprac
final scene would have us believe (a nu ticably large, he saw no reason to
clear explosion thunders offstage to dra spend weeks refining the estimate.
matize the point), he would quickly That his calculation had hugely over
have seen that a bomb could be built. estimated the critical mass he obvious
This pseudoscientific fantasy is the ly didn't realize, or he would not have
play's central pivot. displayed the result to his colleagues
The celebration of uncertainty is a and continued trusting it until news of
continuous theme in the play. Human the Hiroshima bomb forced him to re
life, like atomic physics, follows this think. The order of magnitude agreed
quantum law described by Bohr: "that with published work, and with pre
there is no precisely determinable ob vailing assumptions when the war be
jective universe. That the universe ex gan, so why would Heisenberg have
ists only as a series of approximations." doubted it? But to acknowledge this is
Thus, the play implies, no judgment of to recognize that there is neither mys
Heisenberg is possible, for all we can tery nor virtue in his miscalculation,
ever discover are the elusive, multiple merely embarrassment?for Heisen
refractions of his image in fallible mem berg, and for the play.
ory. And this might be true in the am We also know something about
biguous world Frayn has constructed, Heisenberg's handling of the plutoni
in which Bohr is unreliable and every um "secret." As proof that he had no
disquieting revelation about Heisen wish to build weapons, Frayn's Heisen
berg is canceled by a nimble riposte. berg cites his withholding from Speer
But quantum mechanics predicts that in June 1942 the possibility that reactor
objects on a human scale obey classical generated plutonium (element 94)
laws of causality. The real Heisenberg might be used to make bombs. "A strik
lived in a world of cause and effect and ing omission," Frayn's Bohr admits. But
uneasy moral compromise, and?the Heisenberg had made no secret of plu
imperfect observability of the quantum tonium in February of that year, when
universe notwithstanding?he left a he addressed the Nazi elite at a Berlin
trail of discoverable facts, facts that up conference that Speer, Hermann Goring
end the interpretation Frayn favors and and Heinrich Himmler had been ex
discredit his portrait of Heisenberg. pected to attend: In the lecture he em
Although Frayn's play insists other phasized that a reactor could be used to
wise, we know that Heisenberg did cal generate "a new substance (element 94)
culate the critical mass for a bomb; in a ... which in all probability is an explo
1939 secret report for the German sive with the same unimaginable effec
Army Weapons Department, he first tiveness as pure uranium 235."
derived a formula that yields a mass in Also misleading is the play's repre
the hundreds of tons for the amount of sentation that as late as June 1942, Ger
"nearly pure" uranium 235 required man scientists were still "slightly
for an exploding reactor (Heisenberg's ahead of Fermi in Chicago." In fact, by
model for a bomb at that point). In the time of Heisenberg's 1941 en
1940 Karl Wirtz heard him explain a counter with Bohr, Allied scientists
further calculation; the details are were much closer to a bomb than were
known because Heisenberg explained the Germans. At the time Heisenberg
them again on August 6,7 and 9,1945, set out for Copenhagen in September
while he was detained in England at 1941, the scientist in charge of Ger
Farm Hall, where hidden microphones many's most promising uranium iso
captured his words. His simplified cal tope separation project had just de
culation used the random walk model clared it a failure. Heisenberg's reactor
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experiments had yet to demonstrate political conformity, including the state
any neutron multiplication. Not even ment of his wife that he "politely de
microscopic quantities of 235U or plu clined" when approached to join an anti
Hitler conspiracy. As for his visit to Does evolution have a direction?
tonium had been isolated, so no experi
Does human history have meaning?
ments to determine the fission properties Copenhagen, the German Office of Cul
relevant to a bomb had been done. With tural Propaganda had requested such a These classic questions have trou
bled more than one wretched
in a few months the head of research at visit by Heisenberg and his colleague
undergraduate who finds himself
the German Army Weapons Department Carl Friedrich von Weizs?cker. This without a date on a Saturday night.
would be contemplating cancellation of trip did require official clearance by the Now in Nonzero: The Logic of
the German fission project. Nazi Party, as the play indicates, but Human Destiny (Pantheon, $27.50),
Allied scientists at this time, by con this was easily arranged by Weizs?ck journalist Robert Wright tackles
trast, had already measured the fission er, whose father was State Secretary for these chestnuts with the principles
properties of 235U and plutonium. Van Foreign Affairs. The propaganda office of game theory. Since both evolu
nevar Bush was about to inform Presi was sufficiently pleased with Heisen tion and human history can be
dent Roosevelt that an atomic bomb berg's performance as an ambassador described as "non-zero-sum"
games, in which there can be a win
could probably be built, with an esti of Nazi culture to sponsor him on at ner without a loser, the net result in
mated critical mass of 25 pounds. And least 10 such propaganda trips in the an exchange between "players" is
Columbia physicists were two months course of the war: to Nazi-occupied frequently positive. In the long run,
away from demonstrating isotope sep Budapest that same year, to Holland in the net positives add up to give
aration by gaseous diffusion. By dis 1943 just after its Jewish population had both direction and meaning,
torting the true relative standing of the been dispatched to Auschwitz, and to according to Wright. The book is a
two countries in this regard, the play Nazi-occupied Poland (as a guest of his nice argument against the party
suggests that if Heisenberg had suc friend the Governor General) not long line belief among biologists that
ceeded in convincing Bohr that the Al after the Germans, by murder and siege the history of evolution has neither
produced greater complexity nor
lies could safely abandon the pursuit and starvation, had annihilated the War
shown direction. Wright's ideas
of atomic weapons, all the world saw Ghetto.
about the meaning of life and the
would have gained. But based on the Copenhagen, with its simultaneous, notion of "God" are interesting?
facts as Heisenberg knew them, the benoften incompatible readings of but be forewarned, Wright's
eficiary would have been a triumphant Heisenberg's mind, is designed to answers might not soothe the exis
Germany, whose tanks, bombers and confront the audience with the impos tential despair of the lonely college
well-trained soldiers in September 1941 sibility of true knowledge, of others or sophomore.
seemed poised to complete the con of oneself. Yet it deploys every resource
quest of Europe. of stagecraft to elevate one view as
From the opening of the play Heisen truer than the rest. By the play's elegiac
I've always wanted to have a twin
berg presents himself as an embattled conclusion, the audience has been led,
brother. Among the perks, I imag
figure: "I wonder if they suspect for one through artful omission and misrepre
ined, would be the opportunity to
moment how painful it was to get per sentation of the historical record, to ac see oneself from the outside, as oth
mission for the trip. The humiliating cept a thoroughly manipulated version ers might. For all the twin
appeals to the Party, the demeaning ef of Heisenberg. This Heisenberg had "wannabes" out there, psychologist
forts to have strings pulled/7 Bohr tells discouraged pursuit of a bomb, had Nancy L Segal explores what it
how Heisenberg was subjected to "the joined in anti-Nazi resistance that lat means to be a twin in Entwined
most terrible attacks" as a "White Jew" er rescued the Danish Jews, had Lives: Twins and What They Tell Us
for teaching Einstein's theories, "how nobly saved the life of a condemned About Human Behavior (new in
the SS brought him in for interrogation," man, had narrowly escaped death at paperback from Penguin/Plume,
$16). The science is all here, but so is
and how he remains under deep sus the hands of the SS on his perilous jour
a deep sense of what twins mean to
picion. "He knows he's being watched, ney home through Germany's ruins at each other. Segal also serves up an
of course. He has to be careful about war's end, and had "never managed to assortment of eerie similarities
what he says." contribute to the death of one single soli between identical twins reared
In order to keep alive the image of a tary person." Bohr, by contrast, is apart, including two brothers who
Heisenberg at odds with the immorality charged with complicity in the human flushed the toilet before and after
around him, Frayn conceals the true disaster of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. using it and who both enjoyed
contours of Heisenberg's accommoda "If people are to be measured strictly sneezing loudly in crowded eleva
tion to the Nazi state. The audience is in terms of observable quantities.../' tors. Perhaps one drawback to being
not told how, more than three years be Bohr begins, only to be interrupted by a twin is that you just might realize
how annoying you are to others.
fore the Copenhagen visit, Heisenberg Heisenberg: "Then we should need a
had resolved his political problems by strange new quantum ethics. There'd
requesting and receiving an official let be a place in heaven for me. And an
ter placing him under the personal pro other one for the SS man I met on my
tection of Himmler, who was a family way home." So fast and so far does
acquaintance. The fantastic suggestion Frayn take us, this somehow is not
that Heisenberg, a committed patriot, meant to shock. Losing sight of the
was involved in anti-Nazi activities moral horizon can make you feel
squares with nothing in a lifetime of giddy?or sick, g

2000 July-August 359

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