Sometimes a book can be illuminating just by getting things wrong. Gino Segrè’s is like that. He is a theoretical physicist and an expert on the neutrino (a particle that, he disarmingly admits, nobody has ever found any use for). He has long been interested in the scientists who attended Niels Bohr’s annual conferences in Copenhagen, which began in 1929. His uncle Emilio Segrè, a Nobel prize winner, was at the last one in 1937. The group included the founders of quantum physics, among them Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli and Paul Dirac, besides Bohr himself. Segrè’s book sets out to be two things – a group biography, plotting the lives, loves, families, hobbies and academic careers of the physicists in Bohr’s circle, and, at the same time, an introduction to quantum theory for nonmathematical readers, giving a simplified account of the struggle that went on in the mid1920s to understand what happens inside atoms.

The trouble is that the two parts have nothing whatsoever to do with one another. Segrè seems to think that because the lives of artists and writers shed light on their work, the same must be true of theoretical physicists. He is evidently encouraged in this notion by the belief that the artistic and scientific developments of the 1920s were somehow linked. James Joyce’s Ulysses and de Chirico’s paintings were, he says, marked by the same “wild experimenting” that led to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. This kind of claim is often wafted about in popular cultural histories, but it is nonsense, and Segrè’s failed attempt to link the lives and work of his physicists demonstrates, very satisfactorily, that it is a dead duck.

Joyce’s Ulysses, to take Segrè’s own example, is drenched in Joyce. His upbringing, family, Irishness and individuality are stamped on every page. It is impossible to think of it being written by anybody else. With Segrè’s scientists, things are quite different. Pauli, for instance, discovered, by sheer mathematical genius, before any experiment had detected them, that neutrinos exist. Besides being a mathematician, Pauli was a Catholic and a Jew, his mother committed suicide, he smoked and drank too much, and he had a brief, unhappy marriage to a dancer. But none of this had any effect on neutrinos. They carried on exactly as before, unmarked by Pauli’s personal problems. If he had not discovered them, someone else would have done, and if nobody had, they would nevertheless exist. That is where art and science differ. For understanding their work, Joyce’s and de Chirico’s lives matter. Pauli’s is irrelevant.

Segrè’s other difficulty is that what makes his scientists worth writing about cannot be written about. Their mathematics, which was their only distinctive characteristic, gave them entrance to a subatomic world that it is impossible to imagine, let alone put into words. Segrè quotes from a lecture by Dirac in which he warns that nature’s fundamental laws “control a substratum of which we cannot form a mental picture”. Whatever caves of ice or interstellar spaces he and his colleagues did their magical mathematics in, it was not the world in which human beings see, hear, smell, eat, sleep, snore and make love. But that is where art and literature happen. Mathematicians do all these things, too, of course, but they also occupy another space that is closed to the rest of us, and plodding through their biographical details or peering at photographs of them in their hats, coats and moustaches will not take us into it.

Segrè acknowledges that, aside from their mathematics, his mathematicians had nothing distinctive about them. They were a bunch of professional men much like any other bunch, some sociable, some not, some philanderers, some faithful. The common assumption that all mathematicians are autistic does not seem to apply. It is true that Dirac, a buttoned-up Cambridge don, suffered from a personality disorder that was noticed even in Cambridge. But it seems likely that this was the result of upbringing rather than mathematical genius. His Swiss father had insisted that he should be addressed only in French. Dirac managed to learn it, so he dined with his father, while his English mother and his siblings, who failed the test, ate in the kitchen. At 24, his brother committed suicide.

Like most professional men, the group was intensely competitive. Heisenberg could not even bear to lose a game of table tennis. Segrè celebrates Bohr’s gentleness and childlike innocence, but he was relentless in argument, on one occasion reducing Heisenberg to tears. He never contradicted his opponents, but spotted their weak points and interrupted humbly, “I don’t mean to criticise, only to learn.” It is surprising that he escaped physical assault.

He did not, though, escape ridicule. The title of Segrè’s book is misleading, as is the picture of a nuclear explosion on its cover. They give the impression that it is about nuclear scientists sealing some kind of thrilling Faustian pact with the devil. But that is not Segrè’s subject at all. His focus is on an early Copenhagen conference in April 1932, before the era of nuclear physics began. The younger scientists, headed by Max Delbrück, wrote and performed a skit based on Goethe’s Faust, but it was not about diabolic pacts. Its purpose was to make fun of their elders, Bohr included. Segrè obviously thinks it hilarious, but to judge from the fragments he prints it was at best feeble-witted and at worst cruel. They chose as the Faust of their skit a hapless Viennese scientist, Paul Ehrenfest, a man deeply conscious of his own inadequacy among the geniuses, who referred to himself in a letter to Einstein as a “harmless frog afraid of being squashed”. The skit describes him as “sad and misbegot”. What Ehrenfest felt we can only guess. But a year later he took his severely retarded son Vassik to a park in Amsterdam, drew a revolver, shot him in the head, then turned the gun on himself. Vassik was blinded by the bullet but survived. Ehrenfest died.

The only other figure in the group who arouses sympathy is Lise Meitner. She was also its only woman, its only experimentalist, and the only one who experienced the horrors of the first world war, serving as a nurse on the eastern front. Being female she was not allowed to use the main entrance or the staircase in the Berlin Chemical institute where she worked. A carpenter’s room in the basement was found for her, with a side entrance to the street. If she needed a lavatory she had to walk to a nearby restaurant. Her colleague Otto Hahn received a Nobel prize, but she did not. Bohr recommended her for one, but the other males in the group seem to have been, in their treatment of her as in everything else apart from their mathematics, ordinary representative males.

Nuclear fallout

The unsung heroine of nuclear physics is Lise Meitner. With Otto Hahn, she discovered nuclear fission, but he got the Nobel prize for their work, not her. An Austrian Jew, Meitner worked closely with Hahn for 30 years, fleeing Germany in 1938. Her scorn for those who stayed behind was withering: “You helped here and there a persecuted person,” she wrote to Hahn, “but millions of innocent human beings were allowed to be murdered without any kind of protest being uttered.”

Read on... book: Copenhagen by Michael Frayn (Methuen £8.99) Famous play about Bohr and Heisenberg

FAUST IN COPENHAGEN: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics and the Birth of the Nuclear Age by Gino Segrè Cape £20 pp310
Buy the book here at the offer price of £18 (inc p&p)

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