When we got home from church Sunday night, I watched a movie made by PBS of the stage play, "Copenhagen." I knew it was going to be scientific because of the names Bohr and Heisenberg. But I couldn't have guessed it would be so much effort to watch. We're all familiar now with the names of Einstein, Fermi, Millikan, Oppenheimer and other Nobel Prise winners who build our atomic bomb that we used on Japan in '45. Heisenberg won his Nobel in '32, but he stayed in Germany when Hitler took over a year later. The great mystery of the drama was a the riddle his personal trip became after going back to Copenhagen in '41 to see his mentor Bohn, evev though the Nazis had already invaded Denmark. Heisenberg's "uncertainty principle" had been offered to science in '27 against strong criticism. Denmark's famous Neils Bohr was like a father to him in those days as they studied particle physics and discussed quantum theory together. Even Einstein had considered "uncertainty" a false premise and said "God does not play dice with the universe." His world fame kept growing greater, as the Jewish genius who had escaped the Holocaust to join in our secret Manhattan Project. Well, the movie kept going over that '41 return of Heisenberg from Germany to Copenhapen to visit another famous Jew, Neils Bohr, (who soon came to America, just as Einstein had fled here from Germany; and joined to help us build our a-bomb). Heisenberg in '41 was head of Germany's similar secret effort. Bohr was so enraged with him that they could hardly talk physics anymore as they'd done years before. Men of detached science had become enemies indeed. Bohr felt the Gestapo was surely recording their talks, and even wondered if the young man he'd known and taught back in the twenties had now turned into a German spy. Did he come to see what Bohr knew of the American effort at using nuclear physics for building a super bomb? The movie ran on and on, even into converstations of the hereafter, and to my mind it was exhausting because everytning was too intense. It wasn't the least bit entertaining and I wondered what partners in misery would watch such a drawn out ordeal the way I was doing. So if any of you saw it, please call me to see if we reached the same conclusion: that Heisenber had more conscience than all the rest. He was no Nazi as I saw it. Now. this post modern age demonstrates that uncertainty is fundamental, which ends scientific determinism. There are no more certainties in our calculations, just high probabilities. But that's good news because it opens the future. There really is new possibility. Heisenberg has answered Einstein's dictum about playing dice with the universe, "GOD alone has whatever absolutes exist" (my words); though Werner Heisenberg himself may not even have believed in GOD. The effect of his "principle" has been to convert the laws of physics into statements about relative, instead of absolute certainties. He died in '76, and this movie suggests that he kept Nazi Germany from having the first a-bomb. When ours hit Hiroshema Aug.5 '45, he wrote an expanation to a German colleague exactly how it was made. So he must have had it in his head all along. He died in '76, leaving us to guess just what he said to Neils Bohr there in Copenhaben early in WW II that ended their friendship with his return to Leipzig University where he'd risen to become head of the physics department.
Niece gave me last week's "Time" in which there's an article about Abraham as great father of three monothestic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Seeing the first two that way was easy because both believe the Old Testament. But he had to quote from the Koran too much to support his inclusion of Islam. It has a story of Abram as a boy breaking the idols of Terah, his dad. And that's pretty obvbiously a made up episode to mark Abraham as an iconoclast, something basic to Islam. Then the repor5t of Abraham going down to Mecca with his son Ishmal to rebuild the Kaaba there, is sure a similar stretch of imagination. And I knew that Muslims don't call him a Hebrew prophet (Gen.20:7), but a Muslim prophet of Allah. The article calls Abraham the "first great monotheist," though it seems rather that he's obedient to the true and living God in spite of false gods that were also worshipped. Monotheism is farther along in the unfolding self revelation of Yahweh as recorded in Scripture, as late as the seventh & sixth centuries B.C. ANGELFIRE.com/or/hazlitt