fiefoe

Moral dilemma:

And at this point you stopped listening. The bomb had already gone off inside your head.
Bohr you would need many tons of it. And it’s extremely difficult to separate.
Heisenberg Tantalisingly difficult.
Bohr Mercifully difficult.
Heisenberg You grasped at least four different central points, all of them wrong.
Bohr So you don’t want me to say yes and you don’t want me to say no.
Bohr The same fear that was consuming you. Because they were afraid that you were working on it.
Not even a hope. A microscopically fine thread of possibility. A wild improbability.
Bohr It’s not a question of goodness. I was spared the decision.
Heisenberg Yes, and I was not. So explaining and defending myself was how I spent the last thirty years of my life.
Preserved it so successfully that he’s now also got a wonderfully important moral dilemma to face.
Bohr So, Heisenberg, tell us this one simple thing: why didn’t you do the calculation?

The third person, a Greek chorus of one:

Margrethe Me he scarcely notices. I watch him discreetly from behind my expression of polite interest as he struggles on.
Bohr I was formed by nature to be a mathematically curious entity: not one but half of two.
Talking in a rather different way, no doubt—I’ve typed out so much in my time about how differently particles behave when they’re unobserved
Margrethe It’s like the worst moments of 1927 all over again, when Niels came back from Norway and first read Heisenberg’s uncertainty paper.
Bohr But after you’ve done it … Margrethe You look back and make a guess, just like the rest of us. Only a worse guess, because you didn’t see yourself doing it, and we did.
Margrethe Because everything is personal! You’ve just read us all a lecture about it!.. but you want to make everything seem heroically abstract and logical.
Margrethe Even the questions that haunt us will at last be extinguished. Even the ghosts will die.
Margrethe But that one single soul was emperor of the universe, no less than each of us.

"Copenhagen"