Dan+M+Week+12

= COPENHAGEN =

I am writing my response this week to the film that we watched on Thursday in class. While adapted from a play originally, it was an excellent movie. One little know fact, is that Heisenberg is actually James Bond in disguise. Played by Daniel Craig, Heisenberg is portrayed as a troubled and distressed individual. Bohr on the other hand, played by Stephen Rae, is portrayed as a calm, and calculated man who aims to make minimal error in everything that he does. It is a surprise to me that these two alternate personalities could have been like father and son, or even could have been productive together.

While under pressure from the Nazis for being half Jewish, Bohr is still able to keep a level head. He knows of the dangers that face him, but doesn’t give in. While many believe that he is in contact with the Americans, he was, in fact, not. Yet. At this same time, Heisenberg is experiencing pressure from the Nazis to develop atomic power. Heisenberg does not cope with this stress quite as well as Bohr. Heisenberg comes to Copenhagen to talk to Bohr about the possibilities of nuclear power. Heisenberg says that the Nazis are interested in developing a nuclear reactor to supply factories and cities with power cheap and effectively. Heisenberg was crunching under the pressure of the Nazis so badly that his tunnel vision of finishing the reactor blinds him from the possibility of radiation. Had he been able to get the reactor up in time, surely he would have died of radiation sickness.

Ironically, Bohr was more ashamed of himself that Heisenberg. This is because he went to Los Alamos and helped to create the atomic bomb, which killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people. It almost seems to me that Heisenberg didn’t want to create the atomic bomb. His prediction of 1000Kg of Uranium is 20 times that of the amount used in the actual bomb. He failed to come up with an accurate prediction because Heisenberg didn’t use the Diffusion equation to calculate the right values of U235.

In conclusion, I thought that the film was very well executed. Although, I could not tell whether the bluish house that the characters were in throughout the movie was supposed to be representative of an afterlife, in which they were discussing their motivations and reconciling their action. Also, could the fact that Margerthe and Neils Bohr follow a different path than Heisenberg also be a tiny bit of symbolism? A very clever little twist perhaps?