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<blockquote data-quote="spiney" data-source="post: 241346" data-attributes="member: 192438"><p>Monday. Copenhagen, BBC4, starts midnight (ie, Tuesday morning).</p><p></p><p>Frayn's play about controversial physicist Heisenberg. "Opened out" for television, but still a play, so all talk and no car chases!</p><p></p><p>Heisenberg was a genius who invented matrix mechanics - a particular form of quantum mechanics - including his famous uncertainty principle (eg, if you measure an electron's position, then its momentum suddenly becomes "fuzzy").</p><p></p><p>Bohr invented the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics (giving the play's title), a quantum system is in an indeterminate state, until you perform a measurment, when it suddenly collapses into one particular state, but you can't predict which beforehand!</p><p></p><p>Leading up to World War 2, many physicists fled the Nazis and settled in USA/Britian, helping the Allied war effort ("Hitler's Gift"!). Heisenberg stayed behind, and worked on the Nazi atom bomb project. At one point, he had a secret meeting with Bohr - only revealed much later - where he "pumped" for information about the Allied atom bomb project, but Bohr refused to give any.</p><p></p><p>At the war's end, Heisenberg let himself be captured by the Allies (rather than end up in Russia). At his debriefing - and up to the end of his life - he insisted he'd stayed behind deliberately, in order to "slow down" Nazi nuclear research, but almost nobody believed him.</p><p></p><p>The play (tv version) takes the form of an imagined (never happened) meeting, some years later (maybe around 1960), in which Bohr and Heisenberg discuss what really did happen.</p><p></p><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_(play)" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_(play)</a> .</p><p><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/cinema/features/copenhagen.shtml" target="_blank">http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/cinema/features/copenhagen.shtml</a> .</p><p><a href="http://werner-heisenberg.unh.edu/" target="_blank">http://werner-heisenberg.unh.edu/</a> .</p><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Heisenberg" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Heisenberg</a> .</p><p></p><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_interpretation" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_interpretation</a> .</p><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle</a> .</p><p></p><p>(The uncertainty principle is often given a "pop explanation" in terms of bouncing particles, but is actually an inequality between non commuting operators, as given just above).</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="spiney, post: 241346, member: 192438"] Monday. Copenhagen, BBC4, starts midnight (ie, Tuesday morning). Frayn's play about controversial physicist Heisenberg. "Opened out" for television, but still a play, so all talk and no car chases! Heisenberg was a genius who invented matrix mechanics - a particular form of quantum mechanics - including his famous uncertainty principle (eg, if you measure an electron's position, then its momentum suddenly becomes "fuzzy"). Bohr invented the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics (giving the play's title), a quantum system is in an indeterminate state, until you perform a measurment, when it suddenly collapses into one particular state, but you can't predict which beforehand! Leading up to World War 2, many physicists fled the Nazis and settled in USA/Britian, helping the Allied war effort ("Hitler's Gift"!). Heisenberg stayed behind, and worked on the Nazi atom bomb project. At one point, he had a secret meeting with Bohr - only revealed much later - where he "pumped" for information about the Allied atom bomb project, but Bohr refused to give any. At the war's end, Heisenberg let himself be captured by the Allies (rather than end up in Russia). At his debriefing - and up to the end of his life - he insisted he'd stayed behind deliberately, in order to "slow down" Nazi nuclear research, but almost nobody believed him. The play (tv version) takes the form of an imagined (never happened) meeting, some years later (maybe around 1960), in which Bohr and Heisenberg discuss what really did happen. [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_(play)[/url] . [url]http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/cinema/features/copenhagen.shtml[/url] . [url]http://werner-heisenberg.unh.edu/[/url] . [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Heisenberg[/url] . [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_interpretation[/url] . [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle[/url] . (The uncertainty principle is often given a "pop explanation" in terms of bouncing particles, but is actually an inequality between non commuting operators, as given just above). [/QUOTE]
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