|| -----Original Message-----
|| From: Justin Schwartz
||
|| >I suspect that it was the lack of resources combined with
|| >Heisenberg's failings as a project leader that doomed the
|| >German a-bomb project.
|| >
||
|| THis is almoset certainly true. After the war, the physicist Samuel
|| Goudschmidt did a postmortem on the Nazi bomb project, and
|| concluded that it
|| was hopeless underfunded.
Which doesn't mean that GoudSMIT exonerated W.H. He believed that H had bungled the research and lied about his moral qualms. An essay by 2 physicists at Penn State states: "he had a very low opinion of experimentalists and he was inept at making calculations and at initiating or overseeing crucial experimental studies. These shortcomings contributed to the failure of the German nuclear projects during the war, the projects for which he was the principal scientist." But he was also theoretically fuzzy, if the Farm Hall tapes are to be believed. When he heard about the US bombs the interned Heisenberg was taped - their quarters were bugged - lecturing the other scientists about how 1 ton of U235 would be required for fission bomb.
Heisenberg's post-war work was misguided, if not cranky. Another Penn State physicist, Abraham Klein, wrote: ----------------------------- For the last thirty years of his life Heisenberg had one overarching scientific interest, to construct a unified quantum theory of matter. The ambition involved was as lofty (and arrogant) as Einstein's search for a unified theory (of a different sort) and was destined to fail for the same reason, namely that the empirical foundation for what they sought to do was not sufficiently developed. Heisenberg's theory, except for a brief period in the mid fifties, was never taken seriously by the scientific community. My own attitude was that his past accomplishments entitled him to be speculative and therefore probably foolish. (...)
I fast-forward to Jan. 1958, which is the last time I ever heard Heisenberg lecture. (I do not have a clear memory of any such instances, but may well have heard him in the interim at international conferences on elementary particle physics, a subject to which I devoted roughly the first decade of my research career. In any event I had also studied some of Heisenberg's papers, and though impressed by their technical content, had, nevertheless, reached the viewpoint expressed above.) (...) Pauli had evinced some interest in the latest version of Heisenberg's theory. (...) If Pauli thought there might be something to Heisenberg's ideas, one ought to listen. The audience included Bohr and Oppenheimer. For me the event is memorable for the reactions of Pauli and Bohr. Pauli interrupted the speaker a number of times: It was clear that his enthusiasm for the theory had evaporated. In the very first of these interruptions, he exploded ``But I already told you last May that is wrong''. ----------------------------- It's true Hitler had no time for long-term weapons research projects and H's report to Hitler at the beginning of the war clearly stated that the bomb wouldn't be ready for years. But H was so pro-Nazi that he risked an SS investigation and rebuffed US offers and friends' pressure to emigrate. H was a trusted Nazi insider and had family connections with Himmler. He knew exactly what the Nazis were up to right from the start, when he got his hands bloody in Munich. He was aware of the atrocities on the eastern front, but said it was worth it to defeat the bolsheviks. The guy was a criminal, no accessory. He was just too full of it (as evidenced by his fierce jealousy of Schroedinger) to be a very effective criminal.
H was also an accomplished con artist. Both Goudsmit and journalist William Sweet believe he spoke for the microphones during his entire internment.
Hakki