BOOK REVIEW : Passionate View of Modern Physics : THE JOY OF INSIGHT: Passions of a Physicist <i> by Victor Weisskopf</i> ; Basic Books; $26.95, 328 pages

Like a Greek tragedy, the odyssey of 20th-Century physics, from quantum mechanics to quarks, never loses its fascination. The cast is familiar, the outcome inevitable, but with each retelling the story gains dimension.

In “The Joy of Insight,” Victor Weisskopf, former director of the European Center for Nuclear (and now particle) Research, has his say. This memoir takes us from his richly textured childhood in Franz-Joseph’s Vienna, through his scientific apprenticeship in Gottingen, Copenhagen, and Zurich in the salad days of quantum mechanics after World War I, to exile in the United States and participation in developing the atomic bomb and his subsequent efforts to limit nuclear weapons.

Jewish in a time and place that proved lethal to millions of other Jews, Weisskopf and his family emerged unscathed. He calls himself a lucky man who seems to have been in all the right places at the right times.

Leaving Vienna for Gottingen, he studied with James Franck and Max Born (both Nobel laureates). There, puzzling over the new quantum mechanics, he first experienced “the joy of insight”--the moment of deep understanding that, aside from his good luck in friends, family and geography, has so enriched his life.

Weisskopf left Gottingen to work in Copenhagen with Niels Bohr, whom he describes lovingly as his personal inspiration. Then he was off to Zurich to serve Wolfgang Pauli, a remarkable physicist who had been analyzed by Jung and who read deeply in mysticism.

In Pauli he found the man who “personified the striving for utmost clarity and purity in science and human relations, . . . the conscience of physics.”

Pauli, who was in America at the outbreak of World War II, was naturally invited to Los Alamos, but his colleagues didn’t encourage him, and he did not go. “With his pure soul, he would not have been happy working for destructive purposes,” Weisskopf writes.

So why did Weisskopf go? “We were all aware that the bomb we were trying to develop would be such a terrible means of destruction that the world might be better off without it. And if it wasn’t possible for anyone to develop a nuclear bomb, there wouldn’t be any danger of the Nazis having one.”

Not until the second bomb was dropped, at Nagasaki, did Weisskopf seem to doubt the wisdom of his efforts. Before that, with the threat of a possible German bomb, and buoyed by the exhilaration of the chase, he admits, “We were unable to confront the moral issues of our work even though we recognized them.” Nor did they confront the problems of nuclear waste when they talked about the upside of nuclear fission, the provision of cheap power.

For all his latter-day remorse, Weisskopf seems to have relished the Los Alamos years. It was a great adventure, living in close quarters with brilliant people and working to outfox the devil incarnate.

One of the most interesting questions Weisskopf raises is the matter of those physicists who chose to remain in Germany. Werner Heisenberg, known for the uncertainty principle, stayed to maintain “islands of decency,” but when asked, did become involved in nuclear research. Fortunately for his conscience and the outcome of the war, the Nazis decided not to develop a bomb. But despite his success in saving many lives, Heisenberg was a man whose life was shattered by his decision to stay.

Another was Hans Jensen, a physicist who later received the Nobel Prize, who risked his life as a member of the underground to tell Bohr that the Germans were not planning to build a bomb. But Bohr, not knowing him, thought he was a Nazi agent sent to mislead the Allies.

A third was Wolfgang Gentner, who stayed to fight from within and, when sent to run the French Institute of Nuclear Physics in occupied Paris, sheltered the resistance activities of Frederick Joliot-Curie. In contrast to Heisenberg, these men were honored after the Allied victory.

After the war, Weisskopf joined the faculty at MIT, produced a popular textbook and, in 1960, returned to Europe to head the first major international laboratory, CERN, in Switzerland, where he used Robert Oppenheimer’s administration of Los Alamos as his model.

After his return to MIT, he joined the Pontifical Academy and advised the Pope on matters of science. To Weisskopf this was an opportunity to work for disarmament, because “the worst abuse of scientific knowledge is ongoing deadly weapons development.”

Something of a snob about culture, Weisskopf uses much of the last chapter to discourse on music. But his opinions as an amateur carry neither the insight nor the authority of his thoughts on physics. They reveal, instead, a side of his character that we didn’t have to know.

Next: Jonathan Kirsch reviews “Presumed Guilty: When Innocent People Are Wrongly Convicted” by Martin Yant (Prometheus Books).