7.
About eight months after the Bath Somerset Conference an unknown messenger delivered a small envelope to Niels Bohr’s apartment in Copenhagen.
His wife, Margrethe Nørlund, heard it fall through the mail slot and left the living room to pick up the envelop from the floor and deliver it to her husband in his study, where he was smoking and reading in the paper about the US Supreme Court decisions ruling race separations in buses unconstitutional.
In Japan, he noticed, the International Military Tribunal had opened their prosecution of 28 Japanese war criminals.
Opening the envelope he found a small white card with three words scribbled in a plain handwriting:
“It is done!”
He smiled to his wife who had stayed in the room out of curiosity, to see what the message was about and to converse with her husband about it, if it was something terribly exciting or just simply important to the family, but the renowned physicist simply put the card in the pocket of his vest and tossed the envelope into the garbage bin.
“What is it, dear? Aren’t you gonna tell me?”
“It was nothing important, Margrethe. I had just asked for verification that a project application I have submitted to the institute was received and read. They will notify me, but I have no doubt it will move on to print.”
“Neither do I”, she said. “I am sure it is brilliant, whatever it is you have written. But it must be important to you since you ask them for confirmation like this. I haven’t seen you do this before.”
Niels Bohr got up and faced her wife, holding her gently by her upper arms with both hands.
“It’s not something that would interest you, but it does hold some importance to me on a personal level. It’s a project I have been working on for a long time, and I wasn’t sure if I could complete it. Also, you may say it was a gamble. It is not about a topic I usually get involved with, so that makes it even more exciting to me.”
“But what is it? It’s like you deliberately avoid telling me, and that just makes me even more curious. You know that.”
“Well, there is no word for it yet, but you may say that it’s an aspect of something called frequency multiplication that most people would not even consider remotely rational. It’s in the experimental stages. I can’t say if anything will come of it. Probably it won’t. But I need something to pass the time with. You know how I am.”
With the eerie intuition of a wife who has stuck by her husband for decades Margrethe Nørlund, fiddling with the pocket where he had hidden the card, and studying him intensely, said:
“Does it have anything to do with that meeting with Einstein in Bath Somerset, where I couldn’t come?”
“Why would you think that?”
“Well, I guess it’s just because that night I had a strange dream. It was not a nightmare as such, but more like… to begin with, it was a nightmare with a lot of noises and shouting and tanks rolling through the streets again, but then I woke up… inside the dream, that is. And I got out of bed to go to the window, and I opened the window, and all of a sudden it was daytime, and yet I could see the moon right next to the sun, and that can never happen, can it?”
“Then I looked down in the street, and there was snow. Snow had fallen, while I was asleep, and children were playing in it, and some were ice skating to the sound of Swan Lake. Then something happened that I don’t remember, but I do remember noticing that there were leaves on the trees, and that lilacs and tulips and all sorts of other flowers were growing, in spite of the snow that covered the streets and the roof tops. It was amazing.”
“Then I woke up, for real, and I was alone in the bed, and somehow I felt the dream had to do about something you were talking about in England. I thought: Everything is going to change. Isn’t that weird?”
“No, I don’t think it’s weird”, he said. “I think it’s a lovely dream.”
“But what does it mean?”
Niels Bohr made a thoughtful grimace, slightly exaggerated, as if he had been presented with a tremendously difficult scientific problem.
“I would say it’s a dream about dreaming… about the importance of dreaming, perhaps? Haven’t you noticed that dreams are always a little better than reality? Maybe they drive us to improve reality, to long for more than what may seem realistic at the time, and perhaps that is why we call them dreams.”
“Nightmares, on the other hand, are when we are incapable – even in our sleep – to picture something better. We are incapable of improving reality, and so we imagine we fall prey to all the dark and cruel and hard things in life. We are unable to solve the problem, and the mind gives up. But then it is just a matter of dreaming some more. Eventually our dreams will help us solve a problem we did not even know we had.”
“I don’t understand that”, she said as she removed himself from his arms and braced herself to pick up the house work.
“The first thing you said I can agree with, but not the last part. How can you have a problem without knowing it?”
THE END