A recent book, Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics by Gino Segrè (Viking, 310 pp., $25.95) has just been reviewed by Freeman Dyson in the New York Review of Books, available at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20700 for $3. Dyson’s comments about Bohr’s views are quoted below. My question is, what do BAUT members think about Dyson’s views on Bohr’s theory of complementarity?

“a bunch of bright young physicists, assembled at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen in the year 1932 for their annual Easter conference, decided to entertain their elders by performing a spoof of Goethe's Faust. … In the front row sat Bohr, Ehrenfest, Meitner, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, and Delbrück, all of them famous physicists... All of them carried away memories of an evening that was a high point of the Copenhagen Institute and of twentieth-century physics. … Einstein has a minor role in the play, as a king with a retinue of trained fleas who cause considerable annoyance to the other characters. The fleas are Einstein's unified field theories, which in 1932 were already becoming an obsession. ... The main question that the book raises is whether the quantum revolution of the 1920s was a unique event in the history of science, or whether it may some day recur. …Bohr's understanding of quantum mechanics was based on a philosophical principle which he called complementarity. Two descriptions of nature are said to be complementary when they are both true but cannot both be seen in the same experiment. In quantum mechanics, the wave picture and the particle picture of an electron or a light-quantum are complementary …. Complementarity in quantum mechanics is an established fact. But Bohr in 1932 proposed to extend the idea of complementarity to biology, suggesting that the description of a living creature as an organism and the description of it as a collection of molecules are also complementary. In this context, complementarity would mean that any attempt to observe and localize precisely every molecule in a living creature would result in the death of the organism. The holistic view of a creature as a living organism and the reductionist view of it as a collection of molecules would be both correct but mutually exclusive. … When Crick and Watson discovered the double helix, they loudly claimed to have discovered the basic secret of life. The discovery came as a disappointment to Delbrück. It seemed to make complementarity unnecessary. Delbrück said it was as if the behavior of the hydrogen atom had been completely explained without requiring quantum mechanics. He recognized the importance of the discovery, but sadly concluded that it proved Bohr wrong. Life was, after all, simply and cheaply explained by looking in detail at a molecular model. Deep ideas of complementarity had no place in biology…. [A] seminal paper by the biologist Carl Woese with the title "A New Biology for a New Century," point[s] the way toward the next revolution. Woese's new biology is based on the idea that a living creature is a dynamic pattern of organization in the stream of chemical materials and energy that passes through it. … In Woese's picture of life, complementarity plays a central role, just as Bohr said it should. At the same time, while Carl Woese and others are debating the future of biology, the great debate over the future of physics continues. It is still a debate over the same questions that caused the disagreement between Bohr and Einstein. Does the quantum theory of the 1920s, together with the standard model of particles and interactions that grew out of it, give us a solid foundation for understanding nature? Or do we need another revolution to reach a deeper understanding? Theoretical physicists are now divided into two main factions. … String theory may be considered to be the counterattack of those who lost the debate over complementarity in physics in Copenhagen in 1932. It is the revenge of the heirs of Einstein against the heirs of Bohr. The new discipline of systems biology, describing living creatures as emergent dynamic organizations rather than as collections of molecules, is the counterattack of those who lost the debate over complementarity in biology in 1953. It is the revenge of the heirs of Bohr against the heirs of Einstein.”