Faust in Copenhagen: a Struggle for the Soul of Physics
Gino Segre Jonathan Cape, 320pp, £20
What could be better? They were young in a discipline that favours the young; they worked at a time when thrilling new ideas came along every week; they needed nothing more to make history than their wits, a good argument and a blackboard - and nobody was giving them any orders. In their little world, notions such as hierarchy, chauvinism and punctuality were mocked, and the thinking and talking ran from morning to night, punctuated occasionally by ping-pong, parlour games and trips to the cinema to see the latest Westerns.
Faust in Copenhagen celebrates not actors or hippies, but theoretical physicists: in particular that luckiest of intellectual coteries who, in the 1920s and early 1930s, first looked inside the atom and discovered such a wealth of ideas that humans would need at least another century to assimilate them. In fact, they discovered the very limit of what we can know.
Their names - Heisenberg, Pauli, Bohr, Dirac, Ehrenfest, Gamow and others - are associated by scientists now with laws, principles and theories, but they were men of flesh and blood, friends and rivals, and their spiritual home was the Bohr Institute in Copenhagen.
Faust is something of an intruder here, and needs explanation. In 1932, the younger participants at the Copenhagen spring seminar staged a Faust parody which substituted people and ideas in their field for the people and ideas of Goethe's play. The script for the parody, which survives, has been taken as a loose framework for this book.
The trick doesn't quite come off, however, because the drama takes place on many stages other than Copenhagen, because it has important characters - Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger to name but two - who didn't belong there, and because 1932 was not its true climax. But Gino Segre, a distinguished theoretical physicist, is more than lucid enough, and above all the story is more than good enough, to compensate.
Newton left behind him certainties that two centuries of later discoveries had not shaken: there seemed to be a clockwork regularity to the observed world, and the task of science seemed to be one of ever more minute measurement. Then came the electron, the atomic nucleus, radioactivity and quantum theory, and suddenly it was clear that, on the very small level, Newton's rules did not apply at all.
From about 1920, a generation of mostly German theoreticians wrestled with the challenge of finding new rules, and who they were and how they did it make delightful reading in Segre's hands. Their biographies, characters and foibles are already familiar, not least those of the Englishman, Paul Dirac, and his wonderfully literal view of the world. (Asked which of two Impressionist paintings he preferred, Dirac declared: "I like that one, because the degree of inaccuracy is the same all over.") What Segre adds that is fresh is the matrix of interactions and relationships between them.
He also has a practitioner's feel for the way ideas take shape, and is able to connect this smoothly, not only to argument and personality, but also to factors such as age, seniority and personal ambition. In one passage he describes something I have never read before in this context: how much goes to waste in this endeavour, how many bad and wrong ideas there are and how far theoreticians, like experimentalists, rely on trial and error.
It is easy, sometimes, to imagine that the great ideas thrown up by this group, such as matrix and wave mechanics, uncertainty, exclusion, complementarity and spin, all emerged in a logical and orderly fashion: Segre introduces a little welcome muddle.
He is not afraid, though, of the word "genius". For the lay reader, one of the most interesting questions cast up by this story is whether any other generation could have done all this in so short a time, or whether these men (and they were almost all men) were special. Segre clearly believes they were special, and none more so than Niels Bohr, whose status as the genius among geniuses he is anxious to stress.
But he also gives credit to the environment in which they lived and worked. This was a period of great intellectual freedom and openness in physics, with fluid, continuous movement and correspondence between people and institutions. It was also a time of free minds, when the old empires had gone and the dictators had not arrived, and science was for science's sake.
There was nothing to stop them gathering from all around Europe, arguing about electron orbits at 3am, composing monographs on the ping-pong table, talking in three languages at once, and thinking the unthinkable. And so nothing did - and our understanding of the world around us was enriched beyond measure.
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