faust in copenhagen
On July 4, 2016, my entrance fee paid
I peered out Albert Einstein’s window in Bern,
to see the old watchtower I’d read influenced
his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905,
his so-called Miracle Year, and I regretted
not being Dr. Who, able to chat with young Albert,
then teleport over to Denmark in 1932, (which physicists
called their miracle year, it being when they discovered
neutrons and positrons), and as a fly on the wall,
attend the annual Copenhagen Convention, hosted
by Nobel Prize winner, Niels Bohr,
for other great physicists, minus Einstein that year,
who left Europe to avoid the Nazis, and Wolfgang Pauli,
who opted for a rest, but including ‘elders’ like Paul Ehrenfest,
and Lisa Meitner, the only woman invited, plus the young upstarts,
such as Werner Heisenberg and Paul Divac, all of whom spent hours
debating physics’ loftiest concepts, coming to terms
with the fledgling standard model,
(still scientists best explanation for reality)
and after days of heady exchanges, on that 100th
anniversary of Wolfgang Von Goethe’s death in 1832,
closed the gathering with a spoof of Faust, Goethe’s famous
and tragic play about a man who makes a deal with the devil—
theirs written and performed by physics young turks
good naturedly mocking their elders and the era’s
latest discoveries and mysteries, celebrating
the mighty atom, their new favorite toy,
a source of infinite joy.
Soon after, Meitner hit upon the key
to nuclear fission, turning the atom
into a weapon of mass destruction,
and physics became a bargain, Faustian,
the spoof in Copenhagen an ironic premonition.