|| -----Original Message-----
|| From:ravi
|| these letters dont reveal anything more than
|| what is already stated in that story (the letters confirm what is stated
|| as bohr's view in the various versions of the incident).
||
Most historians concur that the letters confirm what I said they confirm: Heisenberg was busting his ass to make an A-bomb for Hitler. The letters aren't sufficient proof, they're corroboration. What Heisenberg was really trying to do is milk or recruit Bohr rather than protect him. As Paul Rose, author of Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project wrote: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/13872 ------------------------------------------- Heisenberg was never in danger of his life from the Gestapo for talking to Bohr at Copenhagen, as Powers and Frayn fantasize. The mission was an intelligence foray, arranged by Heisenberg's confidant Carl-Friedrich von Weizsäcker (with the approval of the latter's father, Ernst von Weizsäcker, the German State-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, later convicted as a war criminal at Nuremberg) with the purpose of ascertaining how far the Allied project had progressed and establishing whether a nuclear weapon was scientifically feasible. That such a fervent German nationalist as Heisenberg, who in 1941 and after preached publicly and privately the virtues of a German conquest of Europe, would say anything treasonous to Bohr is hardly credible. ------------------------------------------- Bohr's statement in one of the letters that W.H. did not wish to discuss specifics is contradicted by the fact that he drew diagrams of a reactor bomb which Bohr later presented at Los Alamos in 1943.
||
|| > 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.
||
||
|| can your provide more details on this and H's fascist connections? lot
|| of people did not up and leave but is that reason enough to call them
|| nazi? where do you stand on the nazi accusations against the other H:
|| heidegger?
||
You seem to have missed the sentence after that. He was a fascist streetfighter, Ravi.
This is from a review of Thomas Powers's Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb", on which Frayn's play is based: http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/amroth/scritti/heisenberg.htm
------------------------------------------- Powers argues that Heisenberg as a young man "had no politics in the usual sense of the term", and appears to believe that his later anti-Nazism rested on this unworldly base. Yet well into his twenties Heisenberg was a keen member of the Jugendbewegung (Youth Movement), an organisation combining outdoor pursuits with a philosophy made up of elitism, anti-intellectualism and ethnic nationalism. At the age of 17 Heisenberg served in a Munich citizens' militia, assisting the Freikorps forces which violently suppressed the 1919 Communist government of Bavaria. According to one source the Munich rising was organised by the Thule Society, a mystical nationalist organisation with links to the early Nazi Party; Thule associates included Rudolf Hess, who also fought in Munich as a member of the Freikorps.
Far from having "no politics", Heisenberg had political views which he expressed with remarkable consistency and frankness. When Hitler took power Bohr remarked to his assistant Leon Rosenfeld, "I have just been to see Heisenberg and you should see how happy Heisenberg is. Now we have at least order." (Bohr, who was half-Jewish, revised this opinion subsequently). In 1938 Heisenberg dismissed the possibility of a Nazi-Soviet pact with "No patriotic German would ever consider that option". In the course of his visit to Bohr in 1941 he expressed satisfaction at the subjection of Eastern Europe, arguing that "these countries were not able to govern themselves", and looked forward to Germany defeating Russia; in 1943 he argued that it was Germany's historic mission to defend Europe against Eastern barbarism, and that a German-ruled Europe might be the lesser of two evils. (Powers says only that "There are times when the 'lesser evil' is a defensible choice, but October 1943 was not one of them". Perhaps if it had been the lesser evil...) As late as December 1944, Heisenberg conceded that the war was lost but added that "it would have been so fine if we had won". -------------------------------------------
I agree that Heisenberg's contribution to quantum theory is cool and all (though I have my suspicion that Bohr had a lot to do with it) but the guy was a fascist dirtbag and his scientific work after Bohr was gone was second rate. He should have shared a cell with Speer instead of being rewarded with the appointment to the Max Planck Institute.
I'll leave it there.
Hakki