[personal profile] 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.
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