Coming into Copenhagen, there is a distinctly high probability of coming across the name Niels Bohr at some particularly lucid moment. The specter of quantum mechanics does haunt the city, and it’s a kind of particle-wave experience that will be deliciously confounding long after one leaves their Copenhagen hotels to head for home again. Even if the theories of molecules remain incomprehensible for the duration of the time in the city, time does have a way of looping itself around here, and at one moment it might become clear.
Of course, in the next moment that could all change again, and it’s really rather likely that will happen. Niels Bohr was born here, and taught at the university after demonstrating considerable talents for physics from a very young age. His own take on the underlying structures of the universe became folded in under what’s come to be known as the Copenhagen interpretation, and his ideas have been used by scientists for almost a century now. They’ve also been misused and misunderstood by artists for the same amount of time, but these misreadings are some of the more interesting works of contemporary art.
Michael Frayn’s play, “Copenhagen ,” is a particularly good example of this. The play imagines a real meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg in Copenhagen in 1941, where they discuss the moral implications of nuclear weapons. The play received substantial success and attention, enough so that the Bohr archives released their records that would tell the truth about the conversation between the two physicists.
The distinctions between the real events and the imagined events are enough to build another branch in the universes of quantum theory, leaving many knowns to the realm of probability. Heisenberg was a student of Bohr’s, and came to Copenhagen to study with him, and they later became close friends. So today, in Copenhagen, one might imagine these events all over again, or even wonder about some of the arguments Bohr had with Einstein. In Cartesian time, these events are in the past, but if the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory has any weight, or light, then they may not be as far away as one might probably imagine.
