According to your quantum mechanics.
Heisenberg There
isn’t
a track! No orbits! No tracks or trajectories! Only external effects!
Margrethe Only there the track is. I’ve seen it myself, as clear as the wake left by a passing ship.
Bohr It was a fascinating paradox.
Heisenberg You actually loved the paradoxes, that’s your problem. You revelled in the contradictions.
Bohr Yes, and you’ve never been able to understand the suggestiveness of paradox and contradiction. That’s
your
problem. You live and breathe paradox and contradiction,but you can no more see the beauty of them than the fish can see the beauty of the water.
Heisenberg I sometimes felt as if I was trapped in a kind of windowless hell. You don’t realise how aggressive you are. Prowling up and down the room as if you’re going to eat someone—and I can guess who it’s going to be.
Bohr That’s the way we did the physics, though.
Margrethe No. No! In the end you did it on your own again! Even you! You went off skiing in Norway.
Bohr I had to get away from it all!
Margrethe And you worked out complementarity in Norway, on your own.
Heisenberg The speed he skis at he had to do
something
to keep the blood going round. It was either physics or frostbite.
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 thepassing electron and various molecules 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 Göttingen. 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
Heisenberg There
isn’t
a track! No orbits! No tracks or trajectories! Only external effects!
Margrethe Only there the track is. I’ve seen it myself, as clear as the wake left by a passing ship.
Bohr It was a fascinating paradox.
Heisenberg You actually loved the paradoxes, that’s your problem. You revelled in the contradictions.
Bohr Yes, and you’ve never been able to understand the suggestiveness of paradox and contradiction. That’s
your
problem. You live and breathe paradox and contradiction,but you can no more see the beauty of them than the fish can see the beauty of the water.
Heisenberg I sometimes felt as if I was trapped in a kind of windowless hell. You don’t realise how aggressive you are. Prowling up and down the room as if you’re going to eat someone—and I can guess who it’s going to be.
Bohr That’s the way we did the physics, though.
Margrethe No. No! In the end you did it on your own again! Even you! You went off skiing in Norway.
Bohr I had to get away from it all!
Margrethe And you worked out complementarity in Norway, on your own.
Heisenberg The speed he skis at he had to do
something
to keep the blood going round. It was either physics or frostbite.
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 thepassing electron and various molecules 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 Göttingen. 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
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