Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics

  • Gino Segrè
Viking/Jonathan Cape: 2007. 320 pp. $25.95/£20.00 0224072560 | ISBN: 0-224-07256-0

The year 1932 was a particularly eventful one in physics. In Faust in Copenhagen, the physicist Gino Segrè chooses as his point of departure an annual meeting held in April of that year at Niels Bohr's Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. In Segrè's view, the 1932 gathering symbolized the end of the political neutrality of physics and physicists, coinciding as it did with the arrival of Hitler and crucial discoveries in nuclear physics that would make possible the subsequent development of the atomic bomb.

Segrè introduces us at the outset to seven physicists who attended this series of informal but prestigious meetings: Niels Bohr, Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Ehrenfest, Max Delbrück, Lise Meitner and Wolfgang Pauli. He presents a fascinating comparison of these main characters in the first hundred pages, and then launches into a spirited and engaging history of the development of quantum physics from about 1900 to 1932. Segrè's emphasis is always on the human aspect, and he is unable in this part of the book to limit his story to the seven physicists whom he claims the book is about. Towards the end, he returns to the original group, vividly describing their subsequent careers, again with illuminating comparisons.

As the nephew of Emilio Segrè, a Nobel prize-winning physicist trained by some of the main characters in the book, Segrè deploys his background effectively for dramatic and comparative purposes. This, however, shortens his distance from the subject matter — for example, the role of experimental physics at Bohr's institute is underplayed. Moreover, he seemingly contradicts his interpretation of the 1932 meeting as the end of the political neutrality of physics, by praising his own field for continuing to this day in the disinterested tradition instigated by Bohr.

Bohr's crucial contributions to quantum mechanics, Segrè writes, were “largely ignored” by Segrè's own generation of physicists, and he seems intent on rectifying the situation. Whether or not this is necessary, Segrè's approach reveals important insight into Bohr as a person as well as into his interaction with and importance for physicists who followed him.

At the end of the 1932 meeting, in celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's death, some of the younger scientists performed a parody of Faust, replacing Goethe's original characters with some of the main theoretical physicists of the day, most of whom were also assembled in Copenhagen: Niels Bohr was portrayed as God, Wolfgang Pauli as the Devil and Paul Ehrenfest as Faust. The parody described the state of physics at the time, and Segrè regards it as sufficiently important to name his book after it.

At least to me, however, Segrè does not integrate the play into his narrative satisfactorily. The worldwide success of Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen, first set up in London in 1998, inspired a still-active interest in the relationship between science and the theatre. Frayn's play even shares two of Segrè's main characters — Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. But Faust as enacted at the 1932 meeting was written not by a professional playwright but by the participant physicists themselves, and one might have hoped that Segrè would have used the opportunity to offer a new twist to the relationship in question. Admittedly, there are quotations from the original Faust at the head of each chapter, as well as a chapter entitled 'Goethe and Faust' and another comparing the physicists' play with Goethe's original. But these instances are provided largely in isolation from the main narrative of the book.

In 1932, German was still the main language of physics — and culture — so the choice of Goethe's Faust as a basis for a satire enacted in German seems natural. Probably in anticipation of his likely readership, Segrè does not quote from the original German, but quotes instead from necessarily inferior English translations. The many quotations from Goethe's Faust are taken from Anna Swanwick's excellent, but by now somewhat archaic, translation from late in the nineteenth century. Likewise, Segrè's treatment of the physicists' Faust is based on the spirited, but sometimes inaccurate, English translation published in 1966 in a highly personal account, Thirty Years That Shook Physics, by the physicist George Gamow (to whom Segrè dedicates his book).

Wolfgang Pauli as the Devil in a parody of Faust, performed by physicists at a meeting in 1932. Credit: NIELS BOHR ARCHIVE, COPENHAGEN

The photographs used to illustrate Faust in Copenhagen are well chosen. Apart from a few minor omissions and factual errors, the book is lively and readable and provides an exciting impression of the development of theoretical physics during a crucial period.