STM+Week+12

Response to “Copenhagen”... This recent class gave me the opportunity to add another movie onto my list of favorites. The best part was that this film was so far off from my usual spectrum of viewing, that had it not been for this class, I would have never even seen, let alone heard of it. “Copenhagen” followed the fictitious meeting between the spirits of Neils Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and Bohr's wife Margrethe. These three apparitions, in the present day, make there way to the remnants of the Bohr home, which had lay deserted for years. The majority of the movie, takes place in a series of flashbacks and thought experiments in which the ghosts recount a certain meeting they had in life, one that has been hotly debated by others up into the present day. I thought that the parts of the movie that talked about the actual events and science were interesting and enjoyed the back and forth “Well, what if..” scenes, but I found myself thinking that this kind of “mystery” just isn't really too related science and falls more closely to tabloid gossip and pointless arguments. Don't get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoyed the film, but I feel that the main topic of the film, “What were they talking about that day.” and “ What if they had said...”, really hold any place in the standard topics that we have been going over this semester. Simply theorizing what long dead scientists may or may not have said at some point in their lives never seemed very academic or scientific. There's real end goal or experiment to conduct and at the end of the day if you finally learn the entirety of what happened, you haven't really advanced the general pool of “knowledge” in any significantly meaningful way. In the end, I loved the film but felt that it didn't belong with the others that we have viewed so far.