Week 5 (March 11)

After the war:  Farm Hall and later years.  Summary and conclusions 

Review of Michael Frayn's Copenhagen

Points to ponder:

• Why were the German scientists so surprised that the U.S. had successfully built and deployed an atomic bomb? 

• Many think that Germany's failure to build a bomb was a simple matter of Heisenberg's inability to calculate a critical mass. Was that true or were there a number of other factors and, if so, what were they? 

• After learning more about Heisenberg's life, has your view of his portrayal in Michael Frayn's Copenhagen changed?  If so, how? 

• As we end this journey, what is your opinion of Heisenberg as a physicist and as a person? 

Heisenberg's 1941 visit with Bohr in Copenhagen:

Heisenberg's impression , excerpted from his autobiography (translated) "Physics and Beyond",  (for the pdf, click here ) (1 page)

A Historical Perspective on Copenhagen

Article in Physics Today by historian David Cassidy about Heisenberg's 1941 visit to Copenhagen, in the larger war context  (for the pdf, click here)  (5 pages) 

After the end of the war:

Heisenberg's writing a summary of the uranium project after the Farm Hall internment: excerpt from Cathryn Carson’s book “Heisenberg in the Atomic Age”     (for the pdf, click here)  (8 pages plus footnotes)

Reviving German Science, about Heisenberg's leadership after the war trying to restore Germany's place in science  (for the pdf, click here)  (2 pages)

Heisenberg 1967 Interview by Spiegel Magazine  (for the pdf, click here)  (7 pages)

The Göttingen Manifesto  – 1957 (translated)

The Göttingen Manifesto was a declaration of 18 leading nuclear scientists of West Germany (among them the Nobel laureates Otto Hahn, Max Born, Werner Heisenberg and Max von Laue) against arming the West German army with tactical nuclear weapons in the 1950s.  The Manifesto ends with the statement ... 

" ...  none of the undersigned are prepared to participate in the creation, testing or deployment of any type of nuclear weapon. At the same time we feel it is extremely important that we continue to work together on the peaceful development of nuclear energy." 

For the pdf, click here (2 pages)

Foreign Membership in the British Royal Society

Two pioneers of quantum mechanics, Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg, were both nominated by Paul Dirac for election to the Royal Society in 1945. At first there was considerable opposition to Heisenberg's election from Max Born, Rudolf Peierls and Francis Simon. These three physicists were all refugees from Germany who had reservations about Heisenberg's activities in World War II. Born gave strong support to Schrödinger's nomination but this was not the case with Peierls and Simon. In time, the opposition became more muted and Schrödinger was elected a Foreign Member in 1949. Heisenberg's subsequent efforts to rebuild science in West Germany and in Europe after the war were welcomed, and he was eventually elected a Foreign Member in 1955. 

In the long history of the Royal Society, Foreign Membership has carried considerable prestige. ... Following World War II, there were discussions among the Fellows on whether to elect distinguished scientists who had retained German citizenship during the war. Two obvious candidates were Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg, who had both won the Nobel Prize for Physics for their revolutionary contributions to quantum mechanics. 

Heisenberg obituary by Samuel Goudsmit  (for the pdf, click here)  (7 pages)

Updated Nov. 16, 2023