George Gamow’s idea of doing a parody of Goethe’s Faust about the state of quantum mechanics for a 1932 meeting of the main builders of the new quantum mechanics at Neils Bohr institute in Copenhagen was a perfect idea. The play was actually written by the biologist Max Delbruck ¨ innocently capturing the reality of the time because Gamow was detained by the Soviets in 1932. Gamow illustrated the play and published a translation in English in 1966 in the book Thirty Years that Shook Physics, which is our starting point. Gamow described it as going from 30 fat years starting at 1900 to a long lasting fallow period starting in 1930 and has continued to the present. Even though Gamow’s play was supposed to be a comic parody of Faust it came off rather bleak with Pauli doing poor Ehrenfest in with the neutrino. We need characters to both lighten the plot and bring some light to the subject. The simple creations of P.G. Wodehouse can be dropped into any time period, but are particularly adapted to both the present, 1900, and the early 1930s when Gamow’s idea became a play. The neutrino will also make a come back, but now in her proper weightless supporting role. Our story about quantum mechanics is best told with the help of these characters who respond to a culture of fashion and conformity by cheerfully dismantling the nonsense and in the process shed some light on the dark.
www.castinganalysis.com