The human side of physics
FAUST IN COPENHAGEN:
A Struggle for the Soul of Physics
By Gino Segrè
320 pp. Penguin Books $16.00
Reviewed by Ruth Douillette
When you picture a gathering of physicists, what do you see? Somber men worrying a theory? Pocket protectors, wild hair, rumpled clothing? Pacing feet, and voluminous scribbling on the chalkboard? Einstein?
Gino Segrè’s Faust in Copenhagen shows us, instead, a family of physicists, the oldsters taking the younger ones under their wings, fatherly discussions, disagreements settled with respect, and most surprising of all, a group of up-and-coming twenty-somethings entertaining their elders—the thirty and over physicists who had already made vast contributions to the developing field of quantum physics—by staging a take-off on Goethe’s Faust.
Gino Segrè, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania, adeptly weaves many threads into an enjoyable tapestry. Perhaps because he’s a physicist himself, steeped in the culture of this tightly-knit scientific cadre, he is able to present a massive amount of information in orderly fashion, weaving ahead and bobbing back at times, but always—eventually—returning to the central theme.
The ostensible focus of Faust in Copenhagen is the annual gathering in Copenhagen in 1932, a momentous time when science verged on nuclear discoveries, and Europe was, although it didn’t know it yet, soon to enter a war that would leave lasting scars. But there is a lot of backstory covered first. I grew impatient waiting for the meeting with its much-touted play, which seemed a long time coming. Segrè gets there eventually.
“Thus did our seven main characters approach the Miracle Year of 1932. It is now time to pick up the story of quantum theory’s development and the passions aroused by the experts’ differences of opinion,” Segrè writes, 101 pages into the book. The meeting and the play are still a long way off.
I felt like a kid on a long drive. “Are we almost there? How much longer?” Once I saw the meeting and play for what it was, the star at the center of a very expansive tapestry, I relaxed and enjoyed the stage preparations. There’s a lot to assimilate.
April 1932, the 100th anniversary of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s death, coincided with the 10th anniversary of Danish physicist Niels Bohr’s institute. A group of young physicists planned some comic relief in the form of a skit adapted from Goethe’s Faust for the physicists’ entertainment at their annual meeting in Copenhagen.
“The humor in . . . the Copenhagen skits may be sophomoric,” Segrè writes, “but it opens the window on the feelings and thoughts of young physicists and reminds us that science, even in most abstract forms, is formulated by humans with the same anxieties and frailties we all have.”
Segrè introduces core characters in chapters of their own— six men and a woman, physicists who converge in Copenhagen in 1932 to attend the conference: Bohr, Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Max Delbruck, Paul Ehrenfest, and Lise Meitner.
Meitner, the experimental physicist among the theorists, struggled to carve a niche as a woman while also facing anti-Semitism that led to the loss of her lab and her subsequent flight to Sweden. It was her flash of insight in 1938 that led to understanding of the process of what was later named “fission.” Despite Bohr’s recommendation, she never received the Nobel Prize. The prize was awarded to her longtime partner Otto Hahn in 1944 “for his discovery of the fisson of heavy atomic nuclei.
Influenced by Einstein’s famous theory, these scholars influenced influenced a new breed of physicists who cut their teeth on Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and Pauli’s Exclusion Principle, and went on to provide ideas for future physicists to deal with, in terms of quarks, gluons and WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles.) Say what?
The confluence of seemingly disparate individuals from different times—Goethe, George Gamow, Bohr, Hitler, Einstein, and many more—invites awareness that we are all interconnected; what we do affects others, now or in the future. And, of course all who lived then, and even we who read this story, were, and are, affected by Hitler’s horrors.
The physics is soft—no formulas, just concepts. Easy enough to follow, loosely anyway, and I assume other readers who grasp the basics of the atom, its protons and electrons and their elliptical orbits around a nucleus, will follow as well. They also will learn how far beyond this physics has progressed.
Segrè attributes the “streak of playfulness [in physicists] that has carried into the present” to the Copenhagen skit. Mischievous names, such as WIMPs for example, point to an ability to retain “childlike curiosity” while addressing “issues as deep as the beginning of the universe or the ultimate constituents of matter.” The laughter in Copenhagen provided the courage to “attack big problems and not shrink in front of obstacles,” Segrè suggests.
Despite the strong science core, the book isn’t difficult conceptually. It’s a comfortable read, a warm chat, really, a tale by an author who cares—a physicist from a family of physicists—woven into the larger scientific and cultural relevancy during the years between between those conflicts. Segrè gives us a peek into the close community of physicists between the world wars.
The book is filled with people who contributed to the vast accumulation of science, not just quantum physics. There are just too many for me to keep them all straight. Others might, but I gave up trying near the end. It felt like being a stranger at a party. Segrè makes introductions, but after a while I was too tired to shake any more hands. Luckily, it didn’t affect the overall story to ignore a few scientists.
If there is anything to fault Segre for, perhaps it is trying to include too much—this is why some readers might drop out after the early chapters. A smaller, more tightly woven tapestry would have suited me better.
Faust in Copenhagen is a comprehensive, yet readable, book about the human side of physics with the tighter focus on seven specific key figures—how they arrived at their theories, who they interacted with, how the politics of the day affected them—and, equally important, what they were like a human beings.
Relax and enjoy the ride. Segrè will get you there.
Ruth Douillette retired after 35 years as a middle school teacher, and now freelances as a writer and photographer. Her essays have been published in the Christian Science Monitor, Cup of Comfort, Chicken Soup for the Soul, and Under Our Skin, an anthology about breast cancer. Her photography has been featured in flashquake's gallery of art. Ruth is a member of the Internet Writing Workshop where she's an administrator for the Practice group. For a sample of her writing and photography, visit Upstream and Down~.
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