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| Conn Henry on 'Copenhagen'
"Science and Ultimate Reality" is, of course, not a matter that is only of
interest to us physicists. "The Copenhagen Interpretation" (the hugely
successful play, which I will see for the first time this evening, at the
Kennedy Center) is of such broad interest that a Symposium on the subject,
that was held yesterday, here in Washington, in the Baird Auditorium of the
National Museum of Natural History (in connection with the opening here of
that play), packed the place. The President's Science Advisor, John
Marburger, III, explained the Copenhagen Interpretation to the very mixed
crowd in the rather diffident way that we usually do. After all, as
Eddington said in his book "The Nature of the Physical Universe," "It is
difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the
substratum of everything is of mental character." And so, many among us
earnestly seek alternative interpretations. In a Postscript to his play,
that was printed for the first time yesterday in the Symposium handout, but
that will appear shortly in the New York Review of Books, Copenhagen's
playwright, Michael Frayn, reacts in the following way to the most common
such attempt to evade Copenhagen: "Another follower of Everett is Murray
Gell-Mann...it seems to me that the view which Gell-Mann favours, and which
involves what he calls alternative 'histories' or 'narratives', is precisely
as anthropocentric as Bohr's, since histories and narratives are not
freestanding elements of the universe, but human constructs as subjective
and as restricted in their viewpoint as the act of observation." Of course,
Frayn is not a physicist. How well have we physicists reported quantum
mechanics to our public, compared, say, to how our predecessor Galileo
reported Copernicus's earlier upsetting of conventional notions? Very badly,
I fear.--
Professor Richard Conn Henry
Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy
and Director, Maryland Space Grant Consortium
The Johns Hopkins University
3701 San Martin Drive
Baltimore, MD 21218-2686
vox: 410-516-7350http://henry.pha.jhu.edu/rch.html
fax: 410-516-4109 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
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Published 2002.03.04
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