What does a physicist do on Helgoland? Shortly before his 80th birthday, Christian Haller writes a small masterpiece
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Loading... - ellis maisie
- 28 Feb 2023
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The novella "Self-clearing fog" is a virtuoso tandem story in which the boundaries between dream and reality, between life and death, become blurred.
Why can't the cyclist on his breakneck descent and the alpine landscape in the background be photographed sharply at the same time, i.e. in one picture? – Something like this is the physics teacher’s starting question when he wants to get his class in the mood for Heisenberg’s “uncertainty relation”. No matter how unsexy physics lessons may be, today's technology would not exist without the formulas that Albert Einstein or Werner Heisenberg came up with.
The mathematical equations, the probability calculations that give us access to the microcosm (and beyond) are quantum leaps charged with sensuality. This is something someone who dedicated himself to the natural sciences at a young age knows, but who has always been a writer at heart: Christian Haller (*1943), who studied zoology in Basel, whose literary oeuvre is on display today, shortly before his 80th birthday ten novels, several volumes of poetry, dramas and essays, takes its readers this time - to Helgoland.
This is this small island that stands quite deserted in the North Sea, accessible by ferry from Cuxhaven. Well developed, meanwhile, open to tourism, well located a hundred years ago for allergy sufferers, since the pollen count is very limited due to the sparse vegetation. And that is also one of the reasons why the protagonist in Haller's novella "The Mists Clearing Up" decided to make the crossing in 1925.
When dreams become reality
The young man, a guest at the Copenhagen Physics Institute, not only suffers from hay fever, but also from calculations on the orbits of electrons. It's high time to clear his head again, especially since a night's observation on his part threw him off course. He sat on a bench behind the institute, oblivious to himself, and saw a man appear in the circle of light from a street lamp, disappear and reappear a little later under the next lamp. Where was the walker in the meantime? There is no certainty about the whereabouts of the other in the dark.
The fact that the "observer", as the young physicist is called, is the historical figure of Werner Heisenberg is already indicated by Haller in the motto of the novella: "As we climbed, the fog had closed ever more densely around our narrowing path..." . The sentence he started comes from Heisenberg and refers to a hike with his Danish mentor – behind whom the Nobel Prize winner Niels Bohr is hiding. Read More…
