Einstein's Genius Club (25 page)

Indeed, by the late 1930s, most physicists were at least speculating on the possibility of creating an atomic explosion. The idea was the logical outgrowth of three decades of revolutionary thoughts about the forces of nature, both large and small. Einstein's theories of relativity had recast how we see the large forces of the universe—gravity, the speed of light. The smallest forces—those within the atom—were next. By 1912, the British physicist Ernest Rutherford had suggested a model for the atom. He filled his laboratory in Manchester with eager young physicists. One, Niels Bohr, emerged as the single greatest theorist of the quantum. When he established his own laboratory in Copenhagen, he attracted a cadre of youngsters eager to take on the atom and make their own marks in history. Among Bohr's students was the young Bavarian Werner Heisenberg.

They met at a lecture given by Bohr in 1922 (the year Bohr won the Nobel Prize). At once, the twenty-year-old Heisenberg impressed Bohr. His questions were pointed and probing, he was not afraid to argue, and he possessed great energy. In the following few years, working with fellow Germans Wolfgang Pauli, Max Born, and Pascual Jordan, Heisenberg developed the foundations of quantum mechanics. From the discovery of “matrix mechanics” to his famous “uncertainty principle,” he played a part second only to Bohr's in the story of the quantum.

Born in 1901 in Würtzburg, a languid and venerable Bavarian town, Heisenberg was raised in a typical patriarchal family. His father, August, was a Greek scholar, ambitious and successful—he passed his “habilitation” and became Professor of Middle and Modern
Greek in 1909, when Werner was eight. The following year, the family moved to Munich, where Werner entered the Maximilians-gymnasium, an illustrious and traditional school where students received instruction in Latin, Greek, mathematics, and, to a much lesser extent, subjects such as history, geography, and athletics. Physics was an afterthought. Werner quickly established himself as a star in mathematics.

August Heisenberg was ambitious not only for himself but for his sons as well. His desire for hearty sons was manifest in frequent “tests” pitting one son against another. These games probably contributed to Werner's obsessive competitiveness. They also bred extreme antipathy: By mid-adolescence, the brothers were fighting bitterly. Their relationship remained frosty at best throughout their lives.

When World War I intervened, not only was Werner's schooling transformed, so too was his home life. His father, an army officer, was immediately called to active duty. He served enthusiastically, eventually volunteering for the front. Within two weeks, his naïve patriotism was tempered by the “pain, misery and suffering” he witnessed.
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He requested a transfer back to Munich in April, leaving the young men in his regiment to fight an old man's war.

Transformed, too, was Werner's educational experience. A new building built for the Gymnasium was turned over to the military. Some faculty went off to the war, only to return quickly, as had Werner's father. Of the seventy-four young students who enlisted, more than one-third were killed. The Gymnasium, in addition to supplying cannon fodder in the form of its pupils, exhorted the younger students to displays of patriotism in support of the war. Werner joined the “Military Preparedness Association,” a national organization with chapters at each Gymnasium. Had the war continued, Werner, who turned seventeen in December 1918, would undoubtedly have served.

One interlude during the war may have changed Heisenberg
profoundly. In 1917, he spent a long summer in the countryside, where he and other students joined in harvesting much-needed hay. There, imbued with the romanticism of hard labor, he studied mathematics and played chess.

In 1920, Heisenberg began studies at the University of Munich. He dazzled his professors, publishing important papers on atomic structure while still a fledgling student. His early love of mathematics was about to pay off. During his last years at the Gymnasium, he had worked through the mathematics of general relativity. His conversion to physics came late in his Gymnasium studies.

All around him, Germany was in chaos. Steeped in the elitist politics of his upper-middle-class academic family, Heisenberg remained with the patriotic Military Preparedness Association, renamed the Young Bavaria League. It encouraged near-cultlike “retreats” into the countryside, where leaders like Heisenberg conducted seminars on truth, honesty, and the cleansing power of nature. Nominally apolitical, the group offered a romantic alternative to the difficult politics of the Weimar Republic. Throughout the early 1920s, groups like Heisenberg's habitually broke off from one organization and joined another. Heisenberg's group seems to have resisted joining any of the more virulent anti-Semitic organizations and retained its devotion to nature and traditional values. Still, he was drawn to science as a transforming enterprise, hoping to work in “those fields in which it was not simply a question of the further development of what is already known.”
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The early 1920s brought about such transformation in our knowledge of the atom that the world still reels from the impact. Heisenberg and his fellow student–colleague Pauli joined Arnold Sommerfeld's Theoretical Physics Institute in Munich. Soon, Heisenberg and Pauli were collaborating with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen and Max Born in Göttingen on what would become
the new quantum physics. It was Heisenberg—sometimes with Bohr's approbation, sometimes without—who forged the beginnings of quantum mechanics and hit upon the uncertainty principle. With Bohr and Pauli as sounding boards and critics, Heisenberg blossomed:

The five years following the Solvay Congress in Brussels looked so wonderful that we often spoke of them as the golden age of atomic physics. The great obstacles that had occupied all our efforts in the preceding years had been cleared out of the way; the gate to that entirely new field—the quantum mechanics of the atomic shell—stood wide-open, and fresh fruits seemed ready for the plucking.
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In 1932, Heisenberg won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the “creation of quantum mechanics, the application of which has led, among other things, to the discovery of the allotropic forms of hydrogen.”

The golden age came to an abrupt end in 1933. The Nazis quickly set about cleansing the German civil service—including the universities—of Jews and other misfits. Aryanism became the modus operandi of state security. Who could be trusted to serve the Nazi regime?
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Aryanism supplied the answer: Only those of the correct race could be so trusted. Serving Hitler's State demanded absolute obedience and sacrifice. Anyone with Jewish blood was perforce untrustworthy.

In 1934, this covenant was backed up by a new law requiring all civil servants to swear personal allegiance to Hitler:

I swear that I will be loyal and obedient to the
Führer
of the German Reich and people, Adolf Hitler, respect the laws, and exercise the obligations of my office conscientiously, so help me God.
⁷

As Mark Walker notes, the oath was administered with a rather elaborate ritual, to reinforce the point: The administrative head
read the oath aloud, the others repeated it in unison, and each confirmed it in writing. Those who refused were fired.
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Heisenberg and his fellow physicists, as employees of the state, swore allegiance.

One of those happy to take the oath was Otto Hahn. Working with Lise Meitner, Hahn spent 1939 in a laboratory at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute aiming neutrons at nuclei. One day, he aimed a neutron squarely at a uranium nucleus and was astonished to find that it split in two. He had discovered nuclear fission. It took only a few months for word to spread across the globe. Scientists from Britain, Germany, the Soviet Union, and Japan debated the technicalities of an atom bomb. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Heisenberg joined what would become known as Hitler's Uranium Club. Soon nine “atomic” task forces, coordinated by Kurt Diebner, were at work in Germany. Heisenberg traveled back and forth from Leipzig to Berlin, busily supervising efforts in those cities. The German atomic effort was under way fully three years before the United States launched its Manhattan Project.

If the Germans lost the race to build the bomb, they certainly succeeded in confounding historians. Documents recently unearthed in Russian archives suggest that Diebner's group might have succeeded in setting off a small thermonuclear bomb in 1945, killing a number of slave laborers.
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Heisenberg's role is by far the most hotly disputed. Did he subvert the Nazi atomic effort, as he claimed, or did he simply bungle the mathematics? Michael Frayn's play
Copenhagen
has rekindled the debate, dramatizing but never clarifying Heisenberg's 1941 meeting with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen.

What were Heisenberg's motives? Perhaps Heisenberg himself never knew. However pure his devotion to science, it could not withstand his patriotism. He was the most prominent physicist to remain in Germany under the Nazi regime. Yet in 1936, he found himself under attack as a “white Jew”—a colleague and friend to the “Jewish physicists” Bohr, Pauli, and Born. He was derided in Nazi publications and reproached for mentioning Einstein when he taught relativity theory.
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Desperate, Heisenberg used his family
connections. Through them, he appealed to SS leader Heinrich Himmler to clear his name. The accusations melted away. A revised security report read: “Heisenberg's political position is in no way to be designated argumentative. He is undoubtedly the unpolitical academic type.”
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So Heisenberg remained in Germany, a scholar immune from politics. Paul Lawrence Rose puts it succinctly: For those like Heisenberg, “their support was spiritual, patriotic, social, national, cultural, moral, natural—indeed anything but the detested ‘political' behavior that defense of the Weimar Republic represented.”
¹²
In Heisenberg's mind, military service was outside politics, and, an avid outdoorsman, he took to it happily. At eighteen, he volunteered for a cavalry unit aiming to fight Communists in Munich. “These two years had tremendous significance for my human development. My position on political questions was perhaps then decided.”
¹³
He remained active through the mid-1930s, training periodically in an army reserve unit.

Scientists like Einstein might stoop to politics. Even his friend Max Planck thought Einstein's pacifism and Zionism too “political.” For Heisenberg, physics, pure in its nobility, lay outside the degradations of politics.
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Ironically, by working on atomic fission, he could defend the fatherland, yet remain unsullied by Nazi policy.

In truth, German physics had become fully Nazified. The Deutsche Physik (German Physics) movement boasted two Nobel laureates as members, Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark. German Physics would defend Nazi ideology, the cult of the Führer, and the wish for a return to a mythical German past. If modern physics endorsed the liberal, democratic, international world, German Physics would fight every vestige of “modern” decadence. If modern physics represented rationalism, German Physics would find ways around the influence of “subversive” scientists, appealing to “will” over the claims of reason.

But this scientific crusade inevitably collided with economic and military realities. German industrialization depended on high technology, and thus on fundamental work in physics. An army of skilled engineers and technicians had built the German military machine, and skilled engineers would be required to keep it running. One theory as to why the Germans failed to build a bomb is simply that there seemed no need. Until Stalingrad in 1942, the march across Europe had been victorious. Once Stalingrad was lost, time had run out. Heisenberg and his nuclear team lacked the resources of uranium and heavy water needed to make a bomb. Even counting several teams at work, the German effort never employed more than several hundred. Tens of thousands worked on the American bomb.
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At the end of the war, an American team captured Heisenberg, Otto Hahn, Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker, Max von Laue, and six other prominent physicists. They were sent to Britain for direct interrogation and for what could be learned by eavesdropping. The secret taping was yet another unprecedented step taken in the name of “security.” The greatest fear was that the fruits of German science might fall into Soviet hands. From the Allied viewpoint, it was vital to find out what Heisenberg and his colleagues knew and when they knew it. As it happened, the Germans seem to have failed. But whether Heisenberg had the knowledge and refrained from using it, or had, in fact, made a fatal calculation of the uranium required, it took him very little time (about twenty-four hours) to come up with an explanation of how the Americans had split the atom and created the atomic age.

Thus, at a house called Farm Hall in the verdant countryside of England, near Cambridge, Heisenberg and his colleagues spent six months talking to one another and, periodically, to the British officers who politely “detained” them. Farm Hall, manorial though it seemed, had been a “safe house” for MI5. It was outfitted with microphones. From July 1945 through early January, the German
physicists were surreptitiously taped. The possibility of eavesdropping did not seem to have occurred to the Germans, who spoke freely among themselves. Indeed, never before had nations taken such scientific hostages.

Once released, Heisenberg came home a hero to his countrymen. He had failed to build the bomb that could have gained Germany's victory, but no disgrace awaited him. Whether true or not, he claimed to have foiled the German bomb effort by deliberately slowing it. His claim seemed to take the high moral ground compared to the United States' atrocity against Hiroshima. The Germans could not escape the grisly fact of their death camps, but Heisenberg made it possible for them to look down on those who had so dramatically perverted the purity of science.