Faust In Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics, by Gino Segré, Viking, 310 pages, $25.95.
Gino Segré’s new book derives its title from a skit performed at the end of a small and informal week-long conference held at Niels Bohr’s physics institute in Copenhagen in April 1932. That year was the centennial of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s death, so the chosen skit was a physicist-based version of Goethe’s epic poem about the battle between God and the Devil (Mephistopheles) for the soul of the very learned but very dissatisfied Faust.
By tradition, the Copenhagen skit was written and performed by the youngest conference participants, parodying the mannerisms and physics discoveries of the older participants. Max Delbrück, a 25-year-old Berlin physicist who later won a Nobel Prize for his contributions to biology, accepted the task of writing and being the Master of Ceremonies for the 1932 skit.
In Delbrück’s script, instead of God there is Bohr, the great father-figure of 20th Century physics, who often prefaced his remarks with "I don’t mean to criticize, but…". Delbrück’s Mephistopheles is Wolfgang Pauli, from Zurich, something of a Peter Lorre look-alike who Segré says was “generally recognized as having the finest critical mind in quantum theory,” not to mention the sharpest tongue. “So young and already so unknown,” was a well-known Pauli-ism directed at fledgling physicists whose work didn’t quite measure up to that of the that of the twenty-something-year-old founders of quantum theory. (Erwin Schrödinger is the exception to this rule. He was in his forties when he discovered the Schrödinger equation.)
The innocent romantic interest of Faust, Margareta (also called Gretchen, her German nickname), was not a person in the Copenhagen skit—she was the neutrino, an entity postulated by Pauli in 1930, not discovered experimentally until the 1950s, and famously made fun of in John Updike’s poem "Cosmic Gall".
Finally, the substitute for Faust was a heroic but soon-to-be tragic figure, Paul Ehrenfest, a Leiden professor and one of Einstein’s favorite physics confidants. Segré says Ehrenfest, who never won a Nobel Prize, “was perhaps the best teacher of them all."
The skit became known colloquially as the Copenhagen Faust. Excerpts from it and humorous drawings of the characters (taken from George Gamow’s book Thirty Years That Shook Physics) are sprinkled here and there in the book, as are translated excerpts from the original Faust. But the Copenhagen Faust is only used as a leverage point in Segré’s book, which is a warmly written account of what happened in the lives of seven of the conference participants from just after World War I until the early 1930s, a time Segré says was “probably the 20th Century’s most dynamic period ... marked by James Joyce’s cryptic retelling of the story of Ulysses, Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal compositions, Giorgio de Chirico’s eerie landscapes, Le Corbusier’s manifesto for a new architecture, and Heisenberg’s perplexing uncertainty principle.”
Werner Heisenberg is indeed one of the seven 1932 conference participants profiled by Segré . Besides Bohr, Delbrück, Pauli, Ehrenfest, and Heisenberg, the other two physicists Segré introduces to the reader are the laconic British theorist Paul Dirac and the female experimental nuclear physicist Lise Meitner, whom Segré describes as one of the 20th Century’s great physicists, overlooked repeatedly by Nobel Prize judges for personal and political reasons.
As Segré points out, 1932 was a pivotal year in several ways, but particularly in physics and German politics. Nuclear physics was born in February of that year, mid-wifed into existence at the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge University by James Chadwick’s discovery of the neutron. Less than a year later, Hitler became the chancellor of Germany, and Faustian bargains—to save one’s family, one’s self, one’s country—were suddenly not so easy to refuse.
Segré’s book, however, is not about Faustian bargains. The "struggle" referred to in the title is between Heisenberg's version of quantum mechanics, called matrix mechanics, and Schrödinger's version, called wave mechanics. While the book does provide a scientific look at the lives of the seven physicists, it is also a personal account that includes stories about Segré’s mother and mother-in-law, both of whom arrived in Munich, Germany, as 18 year-olds in 1918--the same year Wolfgang Pauli and Adolph Hitler arrived there. Heisenberg, also 18 years old, was already in Munich, since it was his hometown and he attended the university there.
Segré’s uncle, Emilio Segré--awarded the Nobel Prize in 1959 with Owen Chamberlain for their discovery of the anti-proton--makes a cameo appearance in the book.
Faust in Copenhagen lacks the pathos of Michael Frayn’s Tony Award-winning play Copenhagen, about the still-mysterious purpose of Heisenberg’s visit to Bohr in occupied Denmark in 1941, but it does almost as good a job of portraying the greatest generation of physicists as Jon Else’s masterful 1981 documentary film, The Day After Trinity, about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the making of the atomic bomb.
Near the beginning of The Day After Trinity, Hans Bethe, who won a Nobel Prize for discovering how stars can exist, says, "You may well ask why people with a kind heart and humanist feelings…why they would go and work on weapons of mass destruction." Unlike the film, Faust In Copenhagen doesn’t attempt to answer to that question. But it does provide some enjoyable background reading.
(similar to my review published in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on January 6, 2008)
Gino Segré’s new book derives its title from a skit performed at the end of a small and informal week-long conference held at Niels Bohr’s physics institute in Copenhagen in April 1932. That year was the centennial of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s death, so the chosen skit was a physicist-based version of Goethe’s epic poem about the battle between God and the Devil (Mephistopheles) for the soul of the very learned but very dissatisfied Faust.
By tradition, the Copenhagen skit was written and performed by the youngest conference participants, parodying the mannerisms and physics discoveries of the older participants. Max Delbrück, a 25-year-old Berlin physicist who later won a Nobel Prize for his contributions to biology, accepted the task of writing and being the Master of Ceremonies for the 1932 skit.
In Delbrück’s script, instead of God there is Bohr, the great father-figure of 20th Century physics, who often prefaced his remarks with "I don’t mean to criticize, but…". Delbrück’s Mephistopheles is Wolfgang Pauli, from Zurich, something of a Peter Lorre look-alike who Segré says was “generally recognized as having the finest critical mind in quantum theory,” not to mention the sharpest tongue. “So young and already so unknown,” was a well-known Pauli-ism directed at fledgling physicists whose work didn’t quite measure up to that of the that of the twenty-something-year-old founders of quantum theory. (Erwin Schrödinger is the exception to this rule. He was in his forties when he discovered the Schrödinger equation.)
The innocent romantic interest of Faust, Margareta (also called Gretchen, her German nickname), was not a person in the Copenhagen skit—she was the neutrino, an entity postulated by Pauli in 1930, not discovered experimentally until the 1950s, and famously made fun of in John Updike’s poem "Cosmic Gall".
Finally, the substitute for Faust was a heroic but soon-to-be tragic figure, Paul Ehrenfest, a Leiden professor and one of Einstein’s favorite physics confidants. Segré says Ehrenfest, who never won a Nobel Prize, “was perhaps the best teacher of them all."
The skit became known colloquially as the Copenhagen Faust. Excerpts from it and humorous drawings of the characters (taken from George Gamow’s book Thirty Years That Shook Physics) are sprinkled here and there in the book, as are translated excerpts from the original Faust. But the Copenhagen Faust is only used as a leverage point in Segré’s book, which is a warmly written account of what happened in the lives of seven of the conference participants from just after World War I until the early 1930s, a time Segré says was “probably the 20th Century’s most dynamic period ... marked by James Joyce’s cryptic retelling of the story of Ulysses, Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal compositions, Giorgio de Chirico’s eerie landscapes, Le Corbusier’s manifesto for a new architecture, and Heisenberg’s perplexing uncertainty principle.”
Werner Heisenberg is indeed one of the seven 1932 conference participants profiled by Segré . Besides Bohr, Delbrück, Pauli, Ehrenfest, and Heisenberg, the other two physicists Segré introduces to the reader are the laconic British theorist Paul Dirac and the female experimental nuclear physicist Lise Meitner, whom Segré describes as one of the 20th Century’s great physicists, overlooked repeatedly by Nobel Prize judges for personal and political reasons.
As Segré points out, 1932 was a pivotal year in several ways, but particularly in physics and German politics. Nuclear physics was born in February of that year, mid-wifed into existence at the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge University by James Chadwick’s discovery of the neutron. Less than a year later, Hitler became the chancellor of Germany, and Faustian bargains—to save one’s family, one’s self, one’s country—were suddenly not so easy to refuse.
Segré’s book, however, is not about Faustian bargains. The "struggle" referred to in the title is between Heisenberg's version of quantum mechanics, called matrix mechanics, and Schrödinger's version, called wave mechanics. While the book does provide a scientific look at the lives of the seven physicists, it is also a personal account that includes stories about Segré’s mother and mother-in-law, both of whom arrived in Munich, Germany, as 18 year-olds in 1918--the same year Wolfgang Pauli and Adolph Hitler arrived there. Heisenberg, also 18 years old, was already in Munich, since it was his hometown and he attended the university there.
Segré’s uncle, Emilio Segré--awarded the Nobel Prize in 1959 with Owen Chamberlain for their discovery of the anti-proton--makes a cameo appearance in the book.
Faust in Copenhagen lacks the pathos of Michael Frayn’s Tony Award-winning play Copenhagen, about the still-mysterious purpose of Heisenberg’s visit to Bohr in occupied Denmark in 1941, but it does almost as good a job of portraying the greatest generation of physicists as Jon Else’s masterful 1981 documentary film, The Day After Trinity, about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the making of the atomic bomb.
Near the beginning of The Day After Trinity, Hans Bethe, who won a Nobel Prize for discovering how stars can exist, says, "You may well ask why people with a kind heart and humanist feelings…why they would go and work on weapons of mass destruction." Unlike the film, Faust In Copenhagen doesn’t attempt to answer to that question. But it does provide some enjoyable background reading.
(similar to my review published in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on January 6, 2008)
