|| From: ravi
|| hakki,
||
|| i posted y'day a link to the actual letters themselves from the bohr
|| archive. i do not see, from a reading of the letters, how the
|| controversy is any further resolved than before.
The letters are only part of the story. The facts about Heisenberg's bomb team were researched by Samuel Goudsmit and his conclusion was that they didn't have a clue about how an atomic bomb worked, hadn't even noticed that you needed plutonium to make one, or even knew how to control nuclear fission in a practical way (with graphite rods). I saw a film of the atomic pile that was the product of their labors. It was nothing to write home about. This lack of theoretical grasp means one of only two things: Incompetence or sabotage. It was incompetence. http://www.bullatomsci.org/issues/1992/s92/s92.goldberg.html
Maybe Heisenberg was out of practice. In 1935, the Nazis declared quantum physics and relativity "Jewish science" and banned it. Werner didn't object or leave. Not surprising, since Werner was a fascist since 17. He'd taken part in the bloody suppression of the Bavarian soviet in 1918.
Goudsmit says that the sabotage story was made up by the bomb team when they were in custody in Britain. Here's what the NYT says: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/07/science/07BOMB.html?pagewanted=print ---------------------- (...) The mystery is the center of an award-winning play, "Copenhagen," by the British playwright Michael Frayn. The play was inspired by a 1993 book by the journalist Thomas Powers, "Heisenberg's War," which argues that Heisenberg destroyed the German project from within.
The revelation made public yesterday "pretty much knocks that out of the water," said Dr. David C. Cassidy, a historian of science at Hofstra University who is the author of "Uncertainty: The Life and Science of Werner Heisenberg." "Heisenberg was working full blast on getting as far as he could on nuclear fission, including a bomb." (...) ----------------------
Heisenberg was pretty good at keeping his own history indeterminate, calling the murder of Bavarian communists "a kind of adventure. It was like playing cops and robbers." Apparently, he liked the game,since he became a Freikorps leader afterwards. But Bohr's letter catches Werner at his game, and nails down his position for all to see: Heisenberg was trying his damnedest to make an A-bomb to win the war for Hitler. He just wasn't any good at it.
So I hope that clears things up for you.
Now some speculation: Did Einstein object to indeterminacy because he was just being stubborn or because he knew Heisenberg was a Nazi? After all, Einstein did give up the universal constant when a Vatican physicist sold him on the big bang, so he couldn't have been that pigheaded.
Hakki