Copenhagen Play Quotes

I know of no actor who is so pure onstage that he thinks only what his character thinks. If he did, he would presumably become the character: a form of madness. This may be of course what happens to Hamlet--he puts on an antic disposition, and gets stuck with it. [...] Acting is mostly a twin-track mental activity. In one track runs the role, requiring thoughts ranging from, say, gentle amusement to towering rage. Then there is the second track, which monitors the performance: executing the right moves, body language, and voice level; taking note of audience reaction and keeping an eye on fellow actors; coping with emergencies such as a missing prop or a faulty lighting cue. These two tracks run parallel, night by night. If one should go wrong, then it is likely that the other will misbehave too. [...] But there is a third and wholly subversive track that intrudes itself at intervals, full of phantom thoughts and feelings that come and go of their own volition. This ghost train of random musings is, of course, to be discouraged, but it can never be entirely denied. As Bohr and his wife, Margrethe, say in the play: "So many things we think about at the same time. Our lives and our physics...All the things that come into our heads out of nowhere.

Many a novel or play written in 1930, which seemed "brutally realistic" then, now seems a little quaint and "unreal" in places, because we no longer live in the semantic environment of 60 years ago. Joyce's Ulysses escaped this trap by not having a point of view at all, at all — his multiple narrator technique gives multiple points of view — just as post-Copenhagen physicists escape it by what they call "model agnosticism," not accepting any one model as equal to the whole universe.

A study by the University of Copenhagen showed that children actually got more exercise while playing freely outdoors than when they participated in organized sports.

CAPTAIN. America? That’s a pretty dreadful place, isn’t it? Nothing but rednecks! KURT [gloomily]. Well, it’s not Copenhagen. ALICE

Science is ideologically committed to empiricism, materialism and positivism, and the Copenhagen interpretation is the most consistent with this philosophy. Science didn’t blink when this interpretation demanded the end of determinism, which had previously been the central basis of classical science (“God does not play dice.” – Einstein). It’s astounding that science underwent a 100% volte-face – saying overnight that black is in fact white – without worrying that it had thereby made itself a joke subject, a subject with a 100% range. Science has proved that what it tells you today is 100% true, it might tell you tomorrow is 100% false. What kind of madman would place any reliance on such a subject? It’s worse than religion! Science, if it wanted to save determinism, had to embrace rationalism rather than empiricism, and it refused to do. Science is now pure philosophy and even a religion, a way of thinking designed to protect at all costs the holy status, the sanctity, of the scientific method, which is a strictly antirationalist, empiricist method. Of course, the biggest problem with the scientific method is that it’s 100% irrelevant with regard to mathematics, the 100% rationalist engine that powers science, and without which science would be voodoo.