Musical and Philosophical Prelude
Electrons in the Material World
THEME MUSIC
"Die Dreigroschenoper"
("Threepenny Opera")
by
Kurt Weill

Composer Kurt Weill was born in 1900, the year Max Planck invented the quantum, for just as Planck's work presaged a revolution in physics, Weill forever changed the musical stage.

Die Dreigroschenoper, his most famous musical, evokes the turbulent iconoclasm of post-WWI Berlin.  Sweet, melodious harmony has vanished just like the comfortable certainties of late -Victorian physics.  In its place we have strident, discordant and insistent music appealing to the disillusioned post-war generation, including the geniuses of quantum mechanics like de Broglie, Heisenberg and Schrodinger, whose "weird" description of ultramicroscopic particles remains the foundation of physics today.  (And you probably thought raunchy began with Mick Jagger...!)