Year of the Humanities @ Furman

Finding Einstein in the Humanities

The fall of 2005 marks not only the launch of the Year of the Humanities at Furman, but also the final months of a year-long celebration in the international physics community titled “World Year of Physics 2005: Einstein in the 21st century.” So it’s entirely appropriate that physic majors Tamara Coleman (at right) and Anita Roychowdhury devoted their Furman Advantage summer research project with Dr. Susan D’Amato to an exploration of the ways in which the modern physics ushered in by Einstein in 1905 has influenced and sometimes even “guest-starred” in certain 20th century plays and novels. The trio’s reading included works by literary theorists Susan Strehle and Robert Nadeau and by writers Kurt Vonnegut and Margaret Atwood, among others. Their primary focus, however, was Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen, which was performed at Centre Stage-South Carolina in June under the direction of Phil Hill, professor emeritus of theatre arts.

In Copenhagen, Frayn uses the occasion of an actual historical event – Werner Heisenberg’s visit to Niels Bohr in Copenhagen during 1941 – to interweave a number of themes. There is the story of the personal relationship between the men, whose long friendship and professional partnership were strained to the breaking point when Heisenberg, then a research scientist in Hitler’s Germany, visited the half-Jewish Bohr in occupied Denmark. There is also the intriguing story of the groundbreaking physics these two had forged, separately and together, in the decades prior to the war. And finally, there is the central theme of the play, the universal story of human beings struggling to understand each other and themselves. Says Frayn in an interview on the PBS companion website for its film of the play:

“What I wanted to suggest with this play is that there is some kind of parallel between the indeterminacy of human thinking and the indeterminacy that Heisenberg introduced into physics in the 1920s with his formulation of the famous Uncertainty Principle….What the Uncertainty Principle says is that there is no way, however much we improve our instruments, however much we rephrase the question, rethink it, that we can ever know everything about the behavior of a physical object; and I think that it’s also true about human thinking. However good our neurology gets, however many instruments we have for investigating the electrical currents and chemical changes in the human brain, we can, in theory, never know everything about human thinking.”

     Furman Department of Physics

     World Year of Physics 2005

     PBS’s companion website for the film Copenhagen


Home Furman National Endowment for the Humanities	Finding Einstein in the Humanities The fall of 2005 marks not only the launch of the Year of the Humanities at Furman, but also the final months of a year-long celebration in the international physics community titled “World Year of Physics 2005: Einstein in the 21st century.” So it’s entirely appropriate that physic majors Tamara Coleman (at right) and Anita Roychowdhury devoted their Furman Advantage summer research project with Dr. Susan D’Amato to an exploration of the ways in which the modern physics ushered in by Einstein in 1905 has influenced and sometimes even “guest-starred” in certain 20th century plays and novels. The trio’s reading included works by literary theorists Susan Strehle and Robert Nadeau and by writers Kurt Vonnegut and Margaret Atwood, among others. Their primary focus, however, was Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen, which was performed at Centre Stage-South Carolina in June under the direction of Phil Hill, professor emeritus of theatre arts. In Copenhagen, Frayn uses the occasion of an actual historical event – Werner Heisenberg’s visit to Niels Bohr in Copenhagen during 1941 – to interweave a number of themes. There is the story of the personal relationship between the men, whose long friendship and professional partnership were strained to the breaking point when Heisenberg, then a research scientist in Hitler’s Germany, visited the half-Jewish Bohr in occupied Denmark. There is also the intriguing story of the groundbreaking physics these two had forged, separately and together, in the decades prior to the war. And finally, there is the central theme of the play, the universal story of human beings struggling to understand each other and themselves. Says Frayn in an interview on the PBS companion website for its film of the play: “What I wanted to suggest with this play is that there is some kind of parallel between the indeterminacy of human thinking and the indeterminacy that Heisenberg introduced into physics in the 1920s with his formulation of the famous Uncertainty Principle….What the Uncertainty Principle says is that there is no way, however much we improve our instruments, however much we rephrase the question, rethink it, that we can ever know everything about the behavior of a physical object; and I think that it’s also true about human thinking. However good our neurology gets, however many instruments we have for investigating the electrical currents and chemical changes in the human brain, we can, in theory, never know everything about human thinking.” Furman Department of Physics World Year of Physics 2005 PBS’s companion website for the film Copenhagen