Author(s): Gino Segre

Science

In April 1932, about forty mostly young scientists attended Niels Bohr's Copenhagen Institute for their week-long once-a-year freewheeling physics conference. For many, it would come to represent the last gathering where they were able to conduct such discussions in the spirit of camaraderie and in a milieu that felt safe. There was much talk that April about new findings, about their careers and about political events in their own countries, but the core of their discourse was physics. The neutron had been discovered two months before the meeting and the first experimentally induced nuclear transmutation had been achieved just the week before they gathered in Copenhagen. The era of nuclear physics, of nuclear power, of big science and of large-scale experiments had begun. The events of 1932 would change the direction of their research and of their lives.These discoveries also brought with them the first glimmerings of the nuclear weapons that would move physicists into the arena of international power struggles. "Faust in Copenhagen" centres on the lives and careers of seven physicists.