The Pub­li­ca­tions of the Eng­lish Goethe Soci­ety  (vol 77, no 2, 2008, 101–12) has just pub­lished my paper “Faust, the Physi­cists and the Atom­ic Bomb”, based on a lec­ture I gave to the Soci­ety in 2006. It explores the cross-fer­til­iza­tion between sci­ence and lit­er­a­ture in the 1930s, at key moments in atom­ic physics and in the devel­op­ment of the atom­ic bomb — themes that are also dis­cussed in my book Dooms­day Men, which is out this month in paper­back.

In 1932, the cen­te­nary of Goethe’s death, physi­cists attend­ing an inter­na­tion­al con­fer­ence at Niels Bohr’s Insti­tute of The­o­ret­i­cal Physics in Copen­hagen per­formed a par­o­dy of Goethe’s Faust. Goethe’s cri­tique of sci­ence in the play made this a sig­nif­i­cant choice at the dawn of nuclear physics. James Chadwick’s dis­cov­ery of the neu­tron that year was high­light­ed in the per­for­mance.

In 1933 while in Blooms­bury, Lon­don, the physi­cist Leo Szi­lard real­ized how to use a self-sus­tain­ing neu­tron chain reac­tion to release the ener­gy of the atom. The pre­vi­ous year Szi­lard had read HG Wells’ nov­el The World Set Free (1914) in which the phrase “atom­ic bomb” was coined. As well as con­sid­er­ing the Faus­t­ian themes in the nov­el, I explore par­al­lels between Wells’s sci­en­tist, Hol­sten, and Leo Szi­lard him­self. I argue that this is a clear exam­ple of fic­tion influ­enc­ing sci­ence, and that Goethe’s notion that sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge and self-knowl­edge should evolve hand-in-hand, remains a valu­able insight when con­sid­er­ing the role of sci­en­tists in the cre­ation of weapons of mass destruc­tion.

You can down­load a PDF of my paper here.