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.


Either way, I feel that he adores painting pictures of scientific figures' personal lives and the ascent of their academic careers, their personality traits, their friendships and disputes, and their approaches to physics or chemistry. But he does not seem to like muck-raking.

"1927 Solvay Conference on Quantum Mechanics.
Photograph by Benjamin Couprie, Institut International de Physique Solvay, Brussels"
via Wikimedia Commons

In the end, Faust in Copenhagen is a sympathetic, nostalgic, and affectionate book. In its way, it also feels 21st-century and 'of our time'.

Here and there, and I am overinterpreting a little here, he seems to understand machismo or other phenomena of prejudice not as mere strong-minded symptoms of the adversity of the early 20th century, but as problematic behaviour that made lives even harder for some people, in times that were already tough for everyone.

Note: In the photo, Marie Curie is the only woman, and Max Planck is beside her, holding the dented-crowned hat between his knees. Albert Einstein is, of course, in the centre, with Hendrik Lorentz on one side and Paul Langevin on the other. Paul Dirac and, at the right end, Max Born and Niels Bohr are in the second row; Paul Ehrenfest, Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli, and Werner Heisenberg are distributed across the farthest row. All of the names can be seen in the Wikimedia Commons caption here.

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I was amused by the contrast between Segrè's forbearing mindset and, for example, the squabble between the author Thomas Powers, physicist emeritus Gerald Holton, physicist Jonothan Logan and playwright Michael Frayn that was fought out in the letters section of a 2002 issue of the New York Review of Books.

It is concerned (to exaggerate slightly) with loading blame for the mass deaths of Nagasaki and Hiroshima either on Werner Heisenberg or on Niels Bohr, and with the decision whether Heisenberg abetted or hindered German research into the atomic bomb.

It seems reasonable to argue that sharper skeptical engagement might be needed with Bohr or Heisenberg than what Segrè offers if it would help clear up the role of scientists in military research for example.  He mildly refers to controversy, but does not fling himself gladly into the mire and wrestle with what he finds there. But it would be far-fetched to question these mens' research in the 1920s/early 30s anyway. So Segrè has found a good loophole.

Besides, even if I am born far too late to be sure that I am being accurate, I suspect that taking the risk of putting more blame onto Bohr's and Heisenberg's shoulders than is rightfully their share, means revealing that we have generally not understood and dealt with the guilt and blame from World War II enough, not just in — but, in fact, far beyond — the physics world.

(Holton, Gerald and Jonothan Logan, Thomas Powers and Michael Frayn, "'Copenhagen': An Exchange" [New York Review of Books]  (April 11, 2002))

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Further reading: "Gino Claudio Segrè" [Wikipedia] (Retrieved September 20, 2019)