Faust in Copenhagen: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics and the Birth of the Nuclear Age By Gino Segre Jonathan Cape ₤20, 310 pages FT bookshop price: ₤16

Physics was in ferment during the early years of the 20th century. Galvanised by Einstein’s reworking of our comprehension of time and space and Rutherford’s discovery of the atomic nucleus, a group of Europe’s finest scientific minds was engaged in a struggle to understand the nature of matter.

At the centre was Niels Bohr, a theoretical physicist whose achievements stand comparison to Einstein’s. His Copenhagen Institute provided the venue for an annual meeting of these intellectual giants. The Institute gave its name to the “Copenhagen Interpretation” of quantum mechanics. It is now accepted as the best explanation of the catalogue of particles identified in several decades of atom smashing in ever more powerful particle accelerators.

The story of the verbal battles – between the sceptical Einstein, the phlegmatic Bohr, the distant Werner Heisenberg and the licentious Erwin Schrodinger – that eventually put flesh on the bones of the Copenhagen Interpretation has been told often. In Faust in Copenhagen, Gino Segre, nephew of the great Italian scientist Emilio Segre and himself a physicist of distinction, has found a fresh approach. He uses as backdrop a tradition among the younger scientists of staging a skit at the end of each Copenhagen meeting.

In 1932, the year physicists John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton split the atom, the skit parodied Faust to mark the 100th anniversary of Goethe’s death. Segre draws certain parallels between Faust’s bargain with Mephistopheles and the fate of several of the scientists at that meeting. Bohr, for example, played a part in the US Manhattan Project, which resulted in the atomic bomb. Heisenberg worked for the Nazis as head of nuclear fission research.

It’s an interesting device, but one that does not work too well. It imposes a structure on the narrative that can seem forced. Segre, however, does an excellent job of describing the horror and depression that descends on scientists as age saps their ideas. It’s a theme that runs through the book. Segre writes: “Heisenberg, (Wolfgang) Pauli and (Paul) Dirac also created for theoretical physics what I like to call the curse of the Knabenphysik, the notion that one should have done something of significance before turning thirty.”

Now that generations of students have grown up with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the Pauli Exclusion Principle and the Dirac Equation, it is chastening to realise these were discovered by men barely out of their teens. It seems it would take a Faustian pact for anyone much older to emulate them.

Alan Cane is the FT’s senior technology correspondent.