Mulan, Le’s, and Copenhagen

(January 16, 2008)

Today is a whirlwind day.

Amid busyness of work, 16 Chinese colleagues had a farewell lunch with me at Mulan. Many thanks for a heartwarming farewell. I will miss all of my lunch buddies. I look forward to our next get together during site visit.

Shane hosted me and our boss for dinner at the Le’s, a Vietnamese restaurant in Harvard Square. He kindly invited us to American Repertory Theater for Copenhagen show. Two men and a woman had a post-death trialogue, reflecting on the tumultuous earthly moments of their mind encounter in the mid 1920’s and then moral clash in the 1940’s. They were Niels and Margrethe Bohr, both Dane, and Werner Heisenberg, a German. As mentor and protégé, Bohr and Heisenberg were the two pillars of the Copenhagen School of Quantum Mechanics and proponents, respectively, of the Complementary Principle (particle-wave duality) and Uncertainty Principle (location and speed of a particle cannot be known with precision at the same time).

The two men developed a mutual friendship out of attraction of academic brilliance, starting from Heisenberg’s critical comment on a well received lecture given by Bohr in 1922. From 1924 to 1927, young Heisenberg studied under Bohr in Copenhagen. Collaboratively (during their long hours of regular strolling and fast-paced thinking while skiing), or rather independently according to Margrethe’s observation, they developed the fundamental principles of Copenhagen School of Quantum Mechanics. Heisenberg, at 26, returned to Germany to become a full professor and later a leader in Germany’s nuclear research.

Their friendship endured the gravest assault and mistrust on moral ground in the thick of the WWII. In a September 1941 visit to Copenhagen, Heisenberg unintentionally irated Bohr minutes into a stroll, by alluding to the morally questionable practicality of translating Uranium fission research into powerful nuclear weapon. The irony is, while Bohr on the side of the Alliance could be held partially accountable for the obliteration of thousands of civilian lives due to the eventual success of Manhattan Project, Heisenberg’s conscience and providence helped him to be unhelpful to his Nazi Germany eager to improve their weaponry. He was kind enough to win the release of a death row prisoner under his watch. This drama of conscience clash spelled out a counter-intuitive kind of uncertainty principle as played out in the theater of life.

The show was not short of lighter moments with everyday life illustrations to the Complementary Principle and Uncertainty Principle, despite quite a number of unavoidable scientific jargons. The clearly narrated trialogue painted lively scenarios subject only to the whims of the audience. The most emotionally charged segment to me was the vivid description of Heisenberg’s three-day fleeing in a war-torn Germany before his arrest for leading, fortunately unsuccessfully, German nuclear research program. Heisenberg’s patriotism had to be subordinated to his moral compass of doing greater good.

There was a period of philosophizing in relation to both Principles. It has everything to do with measurement, an unavoidable intercourse between the measuring subject (inquirer of truth) and measured object (the truth supposedly out there). Apparently, the formulation of observable quantities of objective truth is intimately intertwined with the subject (scientists and their toys of measurement), an integral part of the larger object (the cosmos). Such talk suspiciously smacks of the postmodern mantra of relative and subjective nature of knowable truth in place of the metanarrative (the grand, unifying, independent objective truth). That aside, the most provocative example of juxtaposition of subject with object is the biblical revelation about God Incarnate, God becoming a man. Therein transcendent divinity mystically puts on and unites with humanity. Or to cover more apologetic ground, I may also add that humanity which springs from divinity now finds the perfect harmony and demonstration in God-man. Theologians tell us that Christ’s humanity (perhaps including the glorified nail marks from Crucifixion), once clothed to the divinity, will last through eternity. Then one may infer that even God the unchangeable trinity in general, Son of God in particular, experiences a subtle but permanent metamorphosis in form owing to the humanity’s salvation melodrama. In a grand way, divinity, while arguably unchanging in its essence, intertwines with humanity. Truth is thus not just out there. Truth is in Him and us, unless we do not live in Truth. In fact, Truth is He, the all-encompassing Lord of all.

There is another deep moment of reflection. While we push God away from the center of knowledge, become the measure and measurer of all things, and perceive the physical world with limit set only by the Uncertainty Principle, we often lose sight of our very self and succumb to self and mutual destruction repeatedly seen in history. The misunderstanding and second guessing in the show served to remind us our fallibility of knowing others and self.

Bohr and Heisenberg saw the ravages and displacement in war time. On our way out, we saw two men enveloped themselves in sleeping bags for a cold night in Harvard Square. Perhaps in a wacky way of the universe, they were Bohr and Heisenberg who were sent to visit us tonight.