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THE LIFE 7laughed’ (UQ: 110).) Altogether the time Popper spent in England wasvery profitable, both scientifically and in personal terms, because hewas able to make new contacts with representatives of British culturethat would prove invaluable during the difficult years of Nazidictatorship and war.Popper’s interests soon extended to the quantum theory formulatedby Heisenberg in 1925, whose interpretation he saw as closely bound upwith the calculus of probability (UQ: 92). He had the chance to go moredeeply into the problem at a congress in Copenhagen in 1936, where hediscussed with Bohr some aspects of the theory that struck him as lessthan convincing—especially the Danish physicist’s view that quantummechanics, unlike classical physics, could not really be understood.This encounter led Popper to investigate the idea of understanding, notin terms of pictures but by focusing on the logical force of a theory.This problem, together with that of corroboration and truth, kept himbusy immediately after the publication of the Logik. In fact, between1934 and 1935 he had met Tarski successively in Prague, Vienna andParis and realized that ‘he had finally rehabilitated the much malignedcorrespondence theory of truth which, I suggest, is and always has beenthe commonsense idea of truth’ (UQ: 98). Popper attached so muchimportance to this that in the autumn of 1935 his first two lectures atBedford College, London were devoted to Tarski, at that time unknownin England.Europe was meanwhile passing through difficult years as a result ofthe totalitarian regimes that had been imposed in various countries.Austria itself was the object of Hitler’s barely concealed appetites, aswell as having many Nazi sympathizers among its own citizens.Members of the Vienna Circle were moving to Britain or the UnitedStates, and Schlick was assassinated in 1936 by a Nazi student. Givenhis Jewish origins, Popper also finally decided to leave the country andapplied for a position teaching philosophy at the University ofCanterbury in New Zealand. in New Zealand. Towards the end of 1936Cambridge University offered him its hospitality, but as he hadmeanwhile obtained the post in New Zealand he declined the offer infavour of Fritz Waismann, a follower of Schlick’s, who was alsoseeking a secure refuge from racial and political persecution.And so Popper and his wife left for their new destination and arrivedin March 1937. They spent the whole of the war there in a climate ofexceptional calm, though at the price of a certain isolation from the restof the world; Britain, with which they had the easiest and most frequentcontact, was five weeks away by sea. Nevertheless, and despite his