Faust in Copenhagen: A Physicist Revisits a Turning Point in Quantum Theory

In 1932 a group of physicists from around Europe met at Niels Bohr's institute in the Blegdamsvej in Copenhagen, in the final year before Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany. (Quite a few of the physicists, like Max Born and Lise Meitner and Werner Heisenberg and Max Planck were based in Germany, as Göttingen and Leipzig and Berlin were important physics addresses at the time). It was also the last period of innocence before their work would lead to nuclear weapons.

Aside from discussing the emergence of the neutron and the neutrino, which resolved important questions about the atom and changed the face of physics forever, they were also entertained by a theatrical parody of Goethe's Faust. One of them caricatured Paul Ehrenfest as Faust, another Niels Bohr as the Lord, a third Wolfgang Pauli as Mephisto, etc., and a Danish woman played a neutrino as Gretchen.

In the late 1920s and early 30s, Germany was no longer associated as strongly with the Kaiser-era imperialist and jingoist tendencies that undermined the moral stature of the German scientific communities during World War I.

(Scientists like Fritz Haber, Ernst Haeckl, Max Planck, and Wilhelm Roentgen, composer Engelbert Humperdinck, artist Max Liebermann, and literary figures like Gerhart Hauptmann, signed a 1914 letter proclaiming amongst other things, in a mischaracterization of the invasion of Belgium, that:

It is not true that our troops treated Louvain brutally. Furious inhabitants having treacherously fallen upon them in their quarters, our troops with aching hearts were obliged to fire a part of the town as a punishment. The greatest part of Louvain has been preserved. The famous Town Hall stands quite intact; for at great self-sacrifice our soldiers saved it from destruction by the flames.

("Manifesto of the Ninety-Three" [Wikipedia] (Retrieved September 19, 2019))

Gino Segrè, a physicist who worked at CERN and Berkeley and taught at the University of Pennsylvania, has written a book about the Copenhagen Conferences and physicists' progress in and around 1932, that 'year of miracles': Faust in Copenhagen (2007).

Bohr and Bohr's guests face almost no adverse judgment from Segrè's pen, in my opinion.

I don't know if the author was forbearing because he reveres these figures so greatly — his physicist uncle also met and knew a few of them; or because he is a rarely optimistic critic of human nature. Or perhaps he was worried about receiving angry reactions, or about betraying the understandings on the basis of which he obtained his material.

September 2019 in Books: What We'll Be Reading Next

It would be a grim and exacting reader who would not be excited about the new books that are appearing this month and the next.

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Notably, 34 years after Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood has revisited her fictional land of Gilead (the dystopic society in which women are treated as chattel) and written a sequel: The Testaments.

It has been published with great fanfare — for example a Booker Prize nomination.

Here is one of the reviews: "The Testaments by Margaret Atwood review – hints of a happy ending" [Guardian/Observer], by Julie Myerson (September 15, 2019)

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Salman Rushdie has released a new novel, Quichotte, that parodies the state of the United States with the tale of Don Quixote as a parallel.

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From Penguin RandomHouse

Ta-Nehisi Coates has written Water Dancer, a magical-realist novel about slavery, which will come out on September 24th. I've already read an excerpt, based on which I think it struggles to come out of the shadow of Toni Morrison or George Saunders (at least, Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo), and that imagination is needed to trust that the prose is like anyone's internal monologue, either in the 1800s or now:

I yanked at the reins but it was too late. We barreled right through and what happened next shook forever my sense of a cosmic order.

It's a degree of abstraction that most people could not spare brainpower or time for in the first-person narrator's situation. Except if they have taken so many creative writing courses that it is now encoded in their DNA.  (Also, I doubt that many 19th-century people would have used the phrase 'cosmic order,' although after searching Google Books I did find it used in a scholarly article from 1882.)