Copenhagen Michael Frayn Quotes

Mathematics becomes very odd when you apply it to people. One plus one can add up to so many different sums

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.

Some questions remain long after their owners have died. Lingering like ghosts. Looking for the answers they never found in life.

Two thousand million people in the world, and the one who has to decide their fate is is the only one who's always hidden from me.

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

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.

We have one set of obligations to the world in general, and we have other sets, never to be reconciled, to our fellow-country men, to our neighbors, to our friends, to our family to our children. We have to go through not two slits at the same time but twenty-two. All we can do is to look afterwards, and see what happened.

But that one single soul was emperor of the universe, no less than each of us.

Heisenberg’s biographer, David Cassidy, posed a large and testing question about Heisenberg’s behaviour before and during the war: How was it possible that Werner Heisenberg, one of the most gifted of modern physicists, a man educated in the finest tradition of Western culture, who was neither a Nazi nor a Nazi supporter, how was it possible that such a man would not only choose to remain in National Socialist Germany for its entire twelve years of existence, but also actively seek a prominent academic position in Berlin at the height of the war, a position that included the scientific directorship of nuclear fission research for the German Army at war?56 It’s a question, obviously, that is asked in hindsight.

I shatter the objective universe around you—and all you can say is that there’s an error in the formulation!” Excerpt From: Michael Frayn. “Copenhagen”.

If you’re doing something you have to concentrate on you can’t also be thinking about doing it, and if you’re thinking about doing it then you can’t actually be doing it. Yes?” Excerpt From: Michael Frayn. “Copenhagen

Better to stay on the boat, though, and fetch it about. Better to remain alive, and throw the lifebuoy. Surely!” Excerpt From: Michael Frayn. “Copenhagen

How difficult it is to see even what’s in front of one’s eyes. All we possess is the present, and the present endlessly dissolves into the past.” Excerpt From: Michael Frayn. “Copenhagen

That was the last and greatest demand that Heisenberg made on his friendship with you. To be understood when he couldn’t understand himself. And that was the last and greatest act of friendship for Heisenberg that you performed in return. To leave him misunderstood.” Excerpt From: Michael Frayn. “Copenhagen

And when all our eyes are closed, when even the ghosts have gone, what will be left of our beloved world?” Excerpt From: Michael Frayn. “Copenhagen

Shy and arrogant and anxious to be loved. Homesick and pleased to be away from home at last.” Excerpt From: Michael Frayn. “Copenhagen”.

Physics, yes? Physics. This is physics. It’s also politics. The two are sometimes painfully difficult to keep apart. Excerpt From: Michael Frayn. “Copenhagen”.

Bohr: You never cared what got destroyed on the way, though. As long as the mathematics worked out you were satisfied. Heisenberg: If something works it works. Bohr: But the question is always, What does the mathematics mean, in plain language? What are the philosophical implications?” Excerpt From: Michael Frayn. “Copenhagen

Decisions make themselves when you’re coming downhill at seventy kilometres an hour. Suddenly there’s the edge of nothingness in front of you. Swerve left? Swerve right? Or think about it and die? In your head you swerve both ways …” Excerpt From: Michael Frayn. “Copenhagen

Not your view, I know—you’d be happy to describe what you were up to purely in differential equations if you could—” Excerpt From: Michael Frayn. “Copenhagen”.

You want me to tell you not to do it? All right. I put my hand on your arm. I look you in the eye in my most papal way. Go back to Germany, Heisenberg. Gather your colleagues together in the laboratory. Get up on a table and tell them: ‘Niels Bohr says that in his considered judgment supplying a homicidal maniac with an improved instrument of mass murder is …’ What shall I say? ‘ … an interesting idea.’ No, not even an interesting idea. ‘ … a really rather seriously uninteresting idea.’ What happens? You all fling down your Geiger counters?” Excerpt From: Michael Frayn. “Copenhagen”.

You never had the slightest conception of what happens when bombs are dropped on cities. Even conventional bombs. None of you ever experienced it. Not a single one of you. I walked back from the centre of Berlin to the suburbs one night, after one of the big raids. No transport moving, of course. The whole city on fire. Even the puddles in the streets are burning. They’re puddles of molten phosphorus. It gets on your shoes like some kind of incandescent dog-muck—I have to keep scraping it off—as if the streets have been fouled by the hounds of hell. It would have made you laugh—my shoes keep bursting into flame. All around me, I suppose, there are people trapped, people in various stages of burning to death. And all I can think is, How will I ever get hold of another pair of shoes in times like these?” Excerpt From: Michael Frayn. “Copenhagen