Copenhagen by Michael Frayn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Quantum Ethics

Intentions maketh the man - in love, life, and war. Well perhaps not. Who knows anyone’s genuine motives, especially one’s own. Our reasons for acting the way we do involve telling a story. Stories justify intentions as rational, beneficial, necessary, or just plain good. But whose story? All stories are arbitrary, or at least incomplete. And they’re all told after the fact. Stories require a point of view which can only be adopted after the consequences of action have emerged. So how compelling are these stories about intentions?

Sometimes, as in Quantum Physics, different, fundamentally incompatible, stories appear necessary to account for what happens - Wave vs. Particle stories for example. Quantum physics raises the question of what is real in the physical world. Analogously, Copenhagen, raises the same issue of reality in the moral world. Frayn uses multiple fictional dialogues between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in 1941, with Bohr’s wife in a role of moderator, as a way to investigate this reality.

Formerly intimate friends, Bohr and Heisenberg found themselves mortal enemies after Germany invaded Denmark in 1940. Both had been instrumental in the discovery of the possibility of nuclear fission, and therefore the the atomic bomb. The purpose of their meeting, initiated by Heisenberg, has always been somewhat mysterious. Frayn uses the confusions of memory and possible misinterpretations of both men to invent his own story about the meeting.

Scientists like Bohr and Heisenberg tend to tell their stories about the physical world in multiple drafts that are then critiqued by their colleagues. So Frayn has them do this dramatically about their own intentions. The first draft is purely professional, all about scientific necessity and the analytic challenges of quantum theory. Intellectual importance, the interests of science, the dignity of humankind are the sorts of motives at hand. Pragmatics, in other words - the theory was useful; it worked. But do these motives work to explain the phenomena of their own behaviour?

The second draft opens the possibility of personal ambition. This version involves a considerable degree of self-rationalisation and putting the best possible gloss on matters of faded memory. Personal reputation, fears, jealousies, and antipathies emerge as things far more important than science or the advance of knowledge. But who can be sure of the combined effects of these hidden emotions. Many of these emotions may be unconsciously harboured and never reach the level of articulate thought. A principle of moral uncertainty emerges: Can we be aware of these motives and act on them at the same time?

The third draft includes the ‘bigger picture’, like involvement in non-scientific ethics - other things that were done, or prevented from being done during the war, that point to justification of one’s actions. Influence rather than direct undertaking is what’s relevant here. Therefore actions are more difficult to pin down as the origin of a chain of events, a chain reaction, indicating an overall programme. Intention becomes murky; and its justification even murkier. Can moral reality be described as a sort of quantum entanglement among events or is it a profoundly artificial abstraction of a sociological system?

It is clear that Copenhagen highlights the issue of scientific ethics. What isn’t clear is what contribution it makes to either the debate or the moral thinking of individual scientists. Heisenberg worked to help a homicidal maniac. Bohr worked to stop that maniac and participated in killing several hundred thousand Japanese as a result. Both men enabled a global reign of terror that persists. Is there an ethic in this story which makes sense?

So, uncertainty rules everywhere. However it is Margarethe, Bohr’s wife, who sees through the male logic and understands the central moral import of the situation. “If it’s Heisenberg at the centre of the universe,” she says, “then the one bit of the universe that he can’t see is Heisenberg.” Ethics come from elsewhere; we can’t trust ourselves with the burden. Who else to trust, therefore, is the critical question.

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