All the world's a stage: Interview with Michael Frayn
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Liz Else
NewScientist.com
23 September 2006
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When Michael Frayn was a child, the other children nicknamed him "the scientist". He wasn't, of course. Just a bright little boy with glasses, who eventually became a successful novelist and playwright. In his writing he worries a lot about who we are, how we understand the world, and how subjectivity lies at the heart of everything - the tricky stuff that science and scientists also grapple with. His latest book, he tells Liz Else, attempts to deal with many of these issues head-on, asking, for example, what the universe would look like if humans didn't exist.
What will your theatre audiences make of you writing a book about human consciousness and the nature of the universe?
I don't want them to think anything. All writers write to tell their story. The Human Touch is a story. I wrote an earlier non-fiction book called Constructions in the 1970s and I went on thinking about our place in the universe and our relationship to it, the scale of everything. While it might be more sensible to keep my mouth shut, if you are a writer and you think about things you can't help but want to write about them.
Doesn't this bring you up against other popular science writers?
No, I am in no sense claiming to be a scientist or a science writer. But it seems that science is so fundamental to the world that even if you aren't a scientist you really have to try to think about it. I hope that I am trying to make just a bit clearer how we fit in with the world. After all, that is what most literature is about. It seems we all face a fundamental paradox in that it's impossible to think about the universe except in terms of its relation to humans. You can't make sense of language, or even scientific laws or mathematics, without the concept of an observer, and yet at the same time we know perfectly well that humans are a very late addition: the universe was here long before us and will be here long after us.
Have you always been interested in science?
No. As a child, I wanted to be a writer. I did want to be a research chemist when I was about seven because I assumed that it was about making explosives. There was a gang at school led by a tremendously ferocious girl, and I was appointed gang scientist because I wore spectacles - and obviously if you wore spectacles you had to be a gang scientist.
My job was to make explosives for the gang but the only materials I could find were chalk and elderberries. I never discovered a way of making a combination of the two explode.
Yet you ended up with lots of friends who were passionate about science.
In my military service days I met Eric Korn, who went on to become a zoologist first and ended up as a scientific bookseller. He had been part of a set at St Paul's School in London. They had a science teacher who had inspired them, and I acquired a little of that passion second-hand. I think it was the first time that I began to see science not as the dull subject people did at school but as another world. A "palace of thought" is how I describe it in the book. It was through Korn that I first heard about uncertainty, quantum mechanics and relativity.
What did scientists make of Copenhagen, your 1998 play about two physicists during the second world war?
Copenhagen builds on the famous meeting between Werner Heisenberg, a leading player in Germany's atomic energy and weapons programme, and his long-time friend the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, where they fell out. You need a lot of physics to tell the story and though I did a great deal of research and got a lot of help from scientists, when the play went on there were a lot of scientific mistakes.
Such as?
Awful, awful, some so embarrassing. For example, I talked about atoms of water vapour. I got many letters from scientists pointing out these errors, not at all with the savagery with which people in the arts deal with each other, just saying gently that perhaps if you look at this line again you might think that molecules of water vapour might be rather better. I got all those corrections incorporated in the play, though I am sure there are other things waiting to be found. I was very much struck by the gentleness with which I was treated. In the end, though, the play is not about physics, it's about how difficult it is to know why people do what they do, to know why we ourselves do what we do.
Have there been any interesting developments in the Bohr-Heisenberg story since Copenhagen came out?
Yes, the Bohr family recently released the draft of a letter Bohr wrote to Heisenberg after their meeting but never sent. The most striking thing about it is his acknowledgement that Heisenberg told him about an atomic weapons research programme in Germany and that he, Heisenberg, was running it. This is absolutely astonishing: Heisenberg was running the most secret research in Nazi Germany. He must have realised that Bohr would attempt to pass on this information, which he did. I think that goes some way to supporting Heisenberg's version of the story. Also, the Heisenberg family has set up a website where you will find a previously unknown letter which Heisenberg wrote to his wife during the week he was in Copenhagen meeting Bohr in September 1941.
Does it mention the conversation with Bohr that is central to your play?
Disappointingly it doesn't, probably because he expected the letter to be opened by the Gestapo, which is also probably why he posted it in Berlin. The letter makes it clear that the one thing we thought we knew - that whatever was said that evening wrecked the two men's friendship - is not true. It didn't wreck their friendship, not at once. Heisenberg spent another agreeable, convivial evening at the Bohr house, even after the conversation. It was probably only as they looked back that they began to think differently.
Are there any scientific stories of our age that you would like to turn into a play?
No, though I do think that we are in the middle of one of those "explosion" times where we are raising fascinating epistemological questions, such as those posed by superstring theory or cosmology. I hope a few more ideas strike and I will do my best to follow them through.
From issue 2570 of New Scientist magazine, 23 September 2006, page 50-51
After reading moral philosophy at the University of Cambridge in the 1950s, Michael Frayn went on to become a journalist. He has combined this with writing successful novels (such as The Tin Men and Spies) and plays (from farces and comedies such as Noises Off to the overtly serious Copenhagen). He also became a leading translator of Chekhov. His new book is The Human Touch: Our part in the creation of a universe (Faber & Faber).
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