Slashdot Mirror
Followup To Bohr-Heisenberg Meeting
December writes "As a follow up to this slashdot article, "The family of Niels Bohr has decided to release all documents deposited at the Niels Bohr Archive, either written or dictated by Niels Bohr, pertaining specifically to the meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg in September 1941. There are in all eleven documents. The decision has been made in order to avoid possible misunderstandings regarding the contents of the documents."
See the Niels Bohr Archive at http://www.nba.nbi.dk/"
Why is this such a big deal anyway? Heissenberg, one of many famous modern physisists might have been a Nazi. So was almost the entire german population for crying out loud. Most of them did not know the entire story, and later on most of them understood that they had been horribly wrong. Let it rest.
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
There was a lot of uncertainty as to whether or not it would happen.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
If they knew Seuss, it'd be the Cat in the Hat in the Box - with the Nazi weapons programme... I'm not sure where the eggs and ham fit in though, can anyone clarify?
I've had waay too much coffee...
Bohr thought the sun would continue to rise in the east. Heinsenberg was said to be uncertain.
-pyrrho
The jet pack is on CNN, you should resubmit it. That is cool stuff, I want one of those to fly to work. It would be so fast!
An article from yesterday's Washington Post headlined "World War II-era scientist Niels Bohr said he was shocked to learn from colleague Werner Heisenberg that Germany was "vigorously in a race to be the first with atomic weapons," according to a decades-old letter released Wednesday."
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
I haven't read the letters but there was a program on TV this evening. IANAH but I'm just writing what I heard on that show.
Basically, they said that Heisenberg travelled to his friend Bohr whom he hadn't seen for years. This was in 1941 while the Germans were still going strong. Bohr didn't believe an atomic bomb was possible. Heisenberg was furious that Bohr didn't believe his physics and replied that he had been heading a team for two years. Heisenberg wanted Bohr on the team. Germany will win; be a slave or be a Nazi.
We now know the outcome. Bohr fled to Sweden, and Heisenberg didn't make the bomb. The thing with these letters is that until now people thought Heisenberg deliberately frustrated the German war effort. Which is apparently not the case.
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Warning: Slashdot may contain traces of nuts.
They met in September 1941. I guess that means we can't know where they met.
Yeah, thanks for the support. I thought that it was a really promising technology. Remember, all the fuss about the Segway? This Jetpack has much more promise and cool factor.
To separate, process, and manufacture the uranium and plutonium necessary for the A bombs, it required 32% of the US electrical output, 23% of the US Silver output (144,000 Troy Ounces was the figure I believe), and 14% of the US aluminum output to construct the plants (at Oak Ridge, Tennessee and Hartford, Washington). Remember this is 1944 people - height of America's industrial might. Now ask yourself if Germany could've done the same...
What the letters make clear is that Bohr felt very threatened by Heisenburg's visit and that he assumed that Heisenburg would be working to create a Nazi A-bomb.
What will never be known is what Heisenburg's intent actually was. Clearly his post-war statements should be viewed with suspicion, but, to give him the benefit of the doubt, he claimed to have been misunderstood by Bohr because he was afraid that the SS was spying on them, which is certainly a possibility.
Yeah, that jetpack dealy sounds a lot more interesting then these useless documents. (The only useful documents are the ones in the basement of mp_beach)
Morphing Software
Yes, it is legal to fire morons and idiots, so I don't think you have a case.
I mentioned it once, but i think i got away with it.
http://www.nba.nbi.dk all linked up and pretty.
.cig - what you do after winning a good flame war
I'm not sure where the eggs and ham fit in though, can anyone clarify?
Yes indeedy, I surely can. Thru the slot in the side to feed the cat. Otherwise the cat would die before anyone opened the box. You wouldn't want to make a mockery of the whole physics quantum thang by letting the cat starve while the theorists dithered about with blackboards and chalk, would you?
Infuriate left and right
In 1942, a prototype reactor in Leipzig exploded when heavy water leaked into a uranium shell, shortly before it would have reached criticality. [2]
We're DAMN LUCKY that Heisenberg's efforts ultimately failed.
[1] Blood and Water: Sabotaging Hitler's Bomb (ISBN 0-8050-3206-1), by Dan Kurzman, p.35.
[2] Ibid, p. 38.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
I would expect the parent in this thread to be modded as funny, but I guess all humor is relative.
No wait... wrong physics principle/theory!
---
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
My understanding was Heisenberg was trying to communicate to Bohr that Germany was building a reactor (hence the little drawing on the napkin, of what appeared to be a reactor). Once the Allies got a hold of this however they took it as the Nazi's were going to build a reactor to make weapons grade plutonium, when in reality the Nazi's didn't belive that a bomb was even possible and in reality were building a reactor to power a large battleship. (if I remember my college history class right).
In later news, The Niels Bohr family have commented that while they can be sure the bulk of the documents remain at the Niels Bohr Archive, the location of documents relating to Mr. Bohr's meeting with Heisenberg cannot be verified, as the documents do not seem to be in plain view at the moment.
www.clarke.ca
If this is true, get a lawyer. If this is not true, get a life.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Even addes a question for slashdot on how feasable the jet pack was and......rejected! Oh well.
If Heisenberg had been unobserved throughout the course of the war, it is possible that he could have taken two ( or more ) separate courses of action - both collaborating with the Nazis to make a bomb and trying to frustrate the attempt.
However given the intense observation of Heisenburg by the Brittish at Farm Hall, where his coversations and those of other scientists were secretly monitored, the state of Heisenburg's loyalties should condense into a single course of action, either one loyal to the Nazis or one where he deliberatly sabotaged the project.
Of course, if we knew Heisenberg's exact intentions, we would be unable to figure out just where he stood, and vice versa.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Ok, Wernher Von Braun father of the US space program .. was a ex-german. He supposedly wasnt a nazi cause he was arrested for not wanting to use nazi slaves to build V2 rockets.
Heisenberg was not a nazi supposedly because he deliberately fudged the german nuclear program.
I dont know, and I dont care. I'm not a nazi, you arent a nazi. I'm not going to be a nazi if any of them were, because there are enough non-nazis I can look up to. Why does it matter?
We know that people were misled back in those days, just as people are being misled today.
You can be a physicist or a plumber, its still posiible for you to be misled.
For the record I dont believe any of them were nazis.
Its pretty obvious if you ask me that Heisenberg wasnt.
-Johan
we'll never know because we can't read them without changing them; that's a certainty.
Not only weren't they kosher, the weren't even patriotic.
So this should die out pretty quickly, I guess.
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
Not even a fist up your ass would make you clever.
Ha!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Untill you read the Heisenberg documents, it will be neither exciting or Bohring!
Fact #1: Bohr and Heisenberg were there when quantum physics was being born. Both contributed greatly to it's discovery.
Fact #2: The Nazis never had the ability to fight and build a nuke after the astonishing raid against the heavy water plant in Norway. In 1941, they had lost the Battle of Britain, were losing the capability to launch an invasion of Britain, and were focussing a lot of effort on the Battle of the Atlantic.
<interlude >
(which they would have won until American long-range bombers(B29s) became available in large numbers - The courage and acheivements of the British Royal and Merchant navies should not be forgotten, but it was the closing of the Iceland-UK gap by airpower that won the Battle of the Atlantic. Thankyou once again America.)
</interlude >
It's all ancient history. But please give respect to the British-trained Norwegians who perpetrated the astonishing raid that ended Nazi nuclear capabilities.
More information:here
Basically, they landed by parachute in Norway, infiltrated one of the most highly defended places in Nazi-controlled Europe, and set of some charges. The charges were placed next to some fat cables deep in a long tunnel. The cables were carrying enough current (many tens of thousands of amps) that the electromagnetic effects when they shorted blew a kilometer of tunnel to bits.
Another team sank a ship carrying 1000 tons of heavy water from Norway to Germany.
After those losses, the German nuke program didn't have chance.
<googlefailure>>
Google (and AltaVista) have failed to give many useful hits on these events. The people who executed these raids deserve more web presence. Please post links.
</googlefailure>>
Because the old Solotrek story has been (07/26/01) on (10/22/00) Slashdot (08/23/00) before.(09/16/99)
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
If you read "Virus House", later published as "The German Atomic Bomb", you will see that the Nazis (Heisenberg, et al.) were astounded when they heard about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They really didn't think it could be done. Was that due to Aryan superiority beliefs or due to their science, hard to say.
One story told by my history of science prof (he had interviewed Teller, Groves, Oppy, Szilard, etc.) was that Max Born was given the assignment of calculating the neutron cross section of graphite. This is useful for determining how much the neutrons coming out of a fission would be slowed, so they can hit another nucleus. For a reactor to work, they need to be slowed a little but not absorbed. Hence the need to know the cross-section.
He apparently goofed with the decimal points, and wound up "proving" that graphite would never work. Pretty surprising since they had a small reactor going in Paris shortly after the city fell, moderated by graphite.
That's why the Nazis kept trying to build heavy water plants - they thought that was the only possible reactor medium to use. But heavy water plants are fairly obvious targets, and Allied saboteurs took most of them out.
John 17:20
That may seem like a mundane explanation, given what we now know about Nazi Germany and the power of nuclear bombs. But Heisenberg probably did not know the extent of Nazi atrocities and he also didn't know whether a real A-bomb would fizzle or bang.
It's tempting to see all of WWII in terms of villains and heroes. But most people were probably neither; they were just people trying to get on with their lives under difficult circumstances. Heisenberg could have been a hero or a villain, but he ended up being neither.
IIRC my teaching correctly, it was the Nazi's inability to recognize that they needed to remove the Boron from their graphite that frustrated their efforts and forced them to move on to heavy water.
No pure graphite, no neutrons, no bomb.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
Stanislaus Lem would probably disagree (if he weren't dead).
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
No, no, no. Remember, Planc's constant (which defines the size of uncertainty) is in Js. That means that if you know when the meeting happened you can't know how much energy was expended there. The conjugate of position is momentum, so to be uncertain where the meeting took place we'd need to know its mass and velocity.
Come on people, this is very simple physics.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
You said things to damage the company you worked for. In public. Under your real name.
I think you are almost eligible for a darwin award.
You can try to get a lawyer, but I doubt you would get much. Freedom in the USA means freedom of speech, it also means freedom to fire people you don't like for whatever reason you want. (Except for a few reasons, such as skin color, religion, etc).
I also wondered where the +5 Funny went. Perhaps fear of Metamoderation? Just a thought.
1000 SlashDot sigs
I'm not a lawyer, but I have taken a few business law courses, so I can't answer your question, but I can provide some more information.
Unless you have a contract stating ootherwise, you have a right to quit at anytime, and your employer has a right to fire you at anytime. No warning or cause need apply.
As for what you posted on your own time, messages posted to message boards are generally considered opinions only and not subject to lible/slander laws. If you stated you worked for the ISP, and sorded your opinion in such a manner that a reasonable person would believe you had authoritive knowledge of their email address selling practices, you sould be subject still.
There is also whistleblower protection, but that's usually reserved for people reporting actual crimes, not giving an opinion.
slander. Cya.
There is a link here of history of the atomic bomb. Oh, and it includes directions on how one is built as well.
On August 2nd 1939, just before the beginning of World War II, Albert Einstein wrote to then President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Einstein and several other scientists told Roosevelt of efforts in Nazi Germany to purify U-235 with which might in turn be used to build an atomic bomb. It was shortly thereafter that the United States Government began the serious undertaking known only then as the Manhattan Project. Simply put, the Manhattan Project was committed to expedient research and production that would produce a viable atomic bomb.
This and this link describe the Japanese atomic bomb program. Germany sent a submarine to Japan carrying uranium oxide, a needed element in building an a-bomb, but it surrendered after Hitler's defeat and was confiscated by the U.S. This uranium could have been used in the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Another good link is here.
There was reason to fear that Germany might win the race to produce the bomb. Fission had been discovered in Germany, and German scientists were at least as able as anyone else to assess its significance. Moreover, it seemed ominous that Germany had stopped the sale of uranium ore from the rich mines in Czechoslovakia. Up until mid-1941, concern over a German bomb had been stronger in Britain than in the United States. About that time, however, the sense of urgency began to pervade U.S. nuclear scientists.
--Metrollica
The funny part is that Bohr wrote a lot of letters to Hessinberg but why didn't he send them? Was is it clear his back later on. We will never know!!!
What rimes on recursion What rimes on recursion What rimes on recursion What rimes on recursion
Main Entry: libel
Function: noun
(a) : a written or oral defamatory statement or representation that conveys an unjustly unfavorable impression (b) : a statement or representation published without just cause and tending to expose another to public contempt
of whether or not heisenberg was actually trying to build a bomb, and not just a reactor as many would argue and as he has claimed.
In the period after Germany was defeated, but before japan was, Heisenberg and numerous other German scientists were taken to England and held in captivity in a cabin of sorts. It was here that they first learned that Japan had been hit with an atomic bomb. During this time, all their conversations were recorded. It was discovered through their conversations that Heisenberg either didn't know the difference between building a reactor and a bomb or was fairly certain that building a bomb was impossible. He has misquoted the needed critical mass for a bomb numerous times.
There is also the issue of the amount of funding Heisenberg asked for from the Nazi Government, which was amazingly minute considering the job of building a bomb would be so large scale.
In the end you can judge Heisenberg as either: incompetent for not being able to build the bomb, a traitor to his nation, or simply a little too apprehensive about what success would cost to put his all into the project at hand. What I will say aobut him is this: at all times he had the project under his control, and he never propagandized for the use of nuclear weapons. In Nazi Germany, there was no nuke.
(at least i didn't make a comment about bohr sounding like bore...)
What computer games did they create?
Sheesh, I think that the translations of the documents might be wrong. When I put one thru babblefish, I get...
Somebody set up us the bomb!
This is obviously a plea for the scientists to develop the A-bomb.
Hiesenberg's Uncertainty Principal says that just by observing those papers, you are going to change their contents... hehehe
It's pointless to read those papers...Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principal says that by observing them, you are going to change their contents... hehehe
I have serious questions about both the accuracy AND the historical importance of the documents, they are some 20 years after the fact for one, and each give a different account.
ASIDE from that and from what can be seen in the threads above few of you seem to be German Military historians. Now, for the most part , nuclear physics was SEVERLY frowned on, Hitler, Goering, Himmler and Goebels, ALL reffered to it as ""JEW SCIENCE"" They INTENTIONALLY and DELIBERATLEY tried to dissuade people from approaching Hitler on the subject and in some circles even talk of it was forbidden. NOW that said, one of the few that had any vision in the matter was Doenitz, it is POSSIBLE that Nuclear programs were being conducted in seceret (From Hitler and Goering, and Himmler who knows about Goebels, he REALLY played both sides of the fence) Other programs were the MP44, when Hitler found out they went ahead with it after he forbade it he went nuts, they did produce a few , but under stipulations, like the ME262 must be carring bombs on take off. Hitler was a Maniac, his way or the highway, I cannot belive he knew of or allowed a Nuclear program under Germany with his consent.
ima-usa.com for some real high caliber fun....
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
This might be somehow off-topic but this is by far the best Bohr story ever (for everybody that got bohred):
Think different
I'm at work. Thanks a lot.
moderators, mod this down.
Although Edward is an amazing individual, you might just want to read his autobiography ( Just published recently, ISBN 0-7382-0532-X ). Of particular note is Edward's perspective of just what happened with regards to his testimony about Robert Oppenheimer. This is now the second book I recommend to aspiring scientists, after Galileo's "Dialogue on the Two World Systems". Both are incredible insights to the world we really live in.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Elsewhere in this thread, I mentioned Dan Kurzman's book Blood and Water - it goes into great detail about the sabotage of the Norsk Hydro heavy-water plant, and the workings of the Nazi A-bomb effort. It's a riveting read, that makes James Bond look like a piker.
Aside from the German program, there was also a British program; rivalries with the Americans hampered both the US and British efforts.
Not mentioned in Blood and Water, Japan also had an A-bomb program of its own, and circumstantial evidence suggests that the Japanese managed to explode a test weapon. This is discussed in Robert K. Wilcox's work, Japan's Secret War (ISBN 1-56924-815-X). Much of this work was carried out in what is now North Korea. A giant industrial complex near Hungnam was dismantled by the Soviets and shipped to Russia after the war ended.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
It's Hanford Washington thats the wasteland, not Hartford.
Just being Anal...
It's legal and right. Hope you learn something from it.
Suggested reading: Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
Hitler never polled a majority in any of the German elections. He at best only managed votes from 39-40 % of the electorate and was awarded the chancellorship unwillingly by an old and tired Hindenburg who was led to believe that this was the only to break the cycle of repeated elections with no clear winner, followed by dissolved governments.
What immediately followed of course is history: The burning of the Reichstag by agents of the Nazis, followed by Hitler's invocation of "emergency powers" to curb what would today be called "terrorism" (sound familiar anyone?). By the time the average German realized what was happening, it was too late and any who were in a position to mount any sort of opposition were either in the camps, dead, or scattered and demoralized.
You're using her as bait, Master!
Schroedinger's cat that was possibly alive and dead at the same time...
see: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~jsw/Schroedinger.html
"...can you imagine a BEOWULF CLUSTER of these? That'd be some serious power!"
Albert Speer, the Third Reich's minister of armaments and war production, wrote in his memoirs, "Inside the Third Reich," that they were working on an A-Bomb and would have produced one by 1947. This would have been a moot point since the Americans did it by 1945.
Not only would this be libel, but if you signed a NDA, you could also be in breach of contract.
lesson 1. Always use funny to moderate posts up.
Other classifications than funny show up in metamod. Funny isn't metamodded, as humor is supposed to be subjective.
If you mod other than funny, someone not agreeing with the post or your moderation might mark it unfair. This would cost you one karma, and the post's moderation.
Summarizing, moderating as funny has two important aspects:
1. don't lose karma
2. make sure views you think important cannot be modded down in metamod.
Stay tuned for the next installment in this series.
Yep taint wise ta argue with the logic of Bohr.
Good thing this Heisenberg fella wer'nt an evil gunfighter. Ptewt!!!
What most people don't seem to know is that Heisenberg didn't visit Bohr alone. Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker was also there, and he is still alive today.
He gave an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung one or two days ago. His recollection of the meeting is rather interesting (the interview is in German, sorry).
Firstly, he says that Heisenberg started an A-bomb project in 1939, in which Weizsäcker took part, but by 1941 they came to the conclusion that they would not be able to succeed before the war was over. The problem was the tremendous effort needed to separate the isotopes. So from 1941 on they were only interested in building a reactor. Once that worked (it never did, as the heavy water production was sabotaged) there might have been the possibility to create Plutonium and build a bomb with that. But they didn't expect this to happen before the war was over by conventional means.
The reason Heisenberg went to see Bohr, according to Weizsäcker, was that they didn't want the Americans or the British to build a bomb either. If they stated publically that they're not working on a bomb, then of course nobody would have believed them. But Heisenberg thought that they might believe Bohr. So he hoped that Bohr could convince the Allies not to build the bomb either. This was not motivated by pure pacifism - he didn't want Germany to get nuked.
In 1941 the war looked pretty good for Germany, they were winning on all fronts. So basically Heisenberg believed that a German victory was inevitable, but with conventional weapons. He tried to explain this to Bohr, who was shocked. Bohr may have understood Heisenberg's "inevitable" to mean that he WAS working on a bomb, and planning to use it. But Weizsäcker suggests that Bohr may well have understood correctly, and didn't want the Germans to win (conventionally), and therefor figured that the Allies would have to build a bomb, to avoid a Nazi victory.
What we can accept as quite reliable, is the following: (a) Heisenberg did lead an A-bomb project from 1939 to 1941. (b) He came to the conclusion that he couldn't build a bomb before the war was over. (c) He continued working on a reactor from 1941 onwards (possibly with the option of producing Plutonium for later weapons use).
And what also seem quite plausible: (d) that he tried to convince Bohr that he was only working on a reactor, not a bomb. This is what he claimed afterwards, and is backed up by Weizsäcker. Many people might not believe these two, so here is another interesting piece of the puzzle:
I read some time ago, either in Physics Today or in Scientific American that when Bohr came to Los Alamos, he brought with him a sketch which Heisenberg had made during his 1941 visit. Bohr claimed it depicted a bomb which Heisenberg was building, but the people at Los Alamos recognised it as a heavy water reactor. As far as I remember, the sketch depicted a large bottle, filled with water (presumably heavy water, but only labelled "H2O"), and some stuff inside. Can anybody dig up this sketch on the net? At any rate, this strongly suggests that Bohr had misunderstood Heisenberg, and mistook Heisenberg's reactor for a bomb.
"...Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Than this.. there is more evidence than just the standard: "Bohr's word against Heisenbergs"
For instance, Gitta Serenys excellent
book "Albert Speer: His battle with truth".
(Albert Speer was the Nazi minister of armaments during the latter part of the war).
In the book Sereny notes that Speer, in a letter to a friend from Spandau prison after the war,
wrote of Heisenbergs engagement in developing an A-bomb, and how he had they had been short of funds.
According to the book, Speer remarked in the letter something to the extent of: "Now, I suppose he'll claim he didn't want the bomb built, and didn't ask for funding".
This is, in fact, what Heisenberg claimed after the war. However, Speer could not have known this, since the prisoners in Spandau were not allowed to read newspapers or have any correspondence with the outside world.
(With the exception of the contraband letters)
To me at least, this seems pretty incriminating,
especially together with the testimony of Bohr.
On the other hand, I would be careful to damn Heisenberg:
Just look at how the USA made a 'hero' out of Werner von Braun, a man who not only built missiles, he administrated the cruel and inhumane concentration camps where the missiles were manufactured.
That's like saying that almost the entire American population consists of hyper-conservative Republicans who can't properly chew snack foods.
To accommodate an earlier post by a fellow ./er, yes, most of the last century's greatest scientists were indeed German, and did indeed live in Germany while it was run by a fascist dictator. In fact, many if not most (see, *I* can use broad generalizations, too) of those same scientists were borrowed for use in developing a burgeoning post-WWII American space program. That program is called NASA now.
I find this kind of what-if Hitler postulating sickening. In a really twisted way, Americans have latched onto and sensationalized what they collectively consider to be the lowest common denominator in human action. With their bums firmly planted on their high horses, they sit back in their easy chairs and watch the steady flow of horseshit revisionism that trickles through the ether on the Hitler (oops, "History") channel.
They sit there, disgusting domestic brew in one hand, greasy remote control in the other, fantasizing about a world devoid of the hated "brown people". If given a public forum, they are lightly scolded for making statements such as "Hitler had some good ideas" (Buchanan). And then they post to Slashdot, hinting at "just how close we came" to the realization of their closet fantasy world.
> Of course, if we knew Heisenberg's exact
:-)
> intentions, we would be unable to figure out
> just where he stood, and vice versa.
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in action.
For my engineering/chemistry professor last year i needed to write a biographyon Heisenberg man. My biography is pretty in depth and a worthy read if anyone is interested. It can be found @ http://artlu.net/essays/wernerbio.html Enjoy, AJ
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artlu.net
Because Rwanda and the Balkans shows us we have learned very little.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
"E=mc2 a biography of the world's most famous equation" by David Bodanis implies with all certainity that he published papers explaining the feasibility to make an A-bomb.
Unless you think Nazi Germany was going to big pains to increase production of heavy water in Norway, mining uranium as fast as they could from Czechslovakia(sp?), and putting Herr Professor Heisenberg in charge of a secret facility researching how to release energy from uranium all for the good of science (in spite of being understood by then that an A-bomb was possible) then you are very naive or malicious.
Add to that the terrifying tidibits of wisdom that Herr Heisenberg was sprouting about Germany ruling the world (as pointed out in this thread) and the only conclussion is villain.
He may have not known about attrocities, but anybody that is ready to use an a-bomb to conquer the world is villain in my book.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Once again a backer of the party of ridicule and deceipt decides to drop a flame-bomb on a slashdot discussion. You forgot to make fun of his physical traits, you must be slipping.
Well said. Being an American under an oppressive Republican regime, I feel almost the same way. Yet, I'm sure European countries must feel that all Americans are greedy, uncompassionate, and wasteful. Well, not all of us are, and I just hope that enough liberals get off their asses and vote next election. Hopefully next time, most of the votes will actually count. Maybe the Supreme Court will even stay out of it and not over-rule us.
Patriotism does NOT = Arrogance
http://www.commondreams.org
Ha ha! No, I'm not a "backer of the Democratic Party". I'm *guessing* that's what you're implying. It's similar to how I also have to *guess* at what you mean with your interesting use of the word "deceipt". Get a spell-checker. Or, better yet, start writing speeches for the fortunate son. You're already more than qualified.
As far as physical traits, I don't even have to bother. How could I possibly top http://www.bushorchimp.com ?? Eeeek eeek! I've just flushed the national surplus down the toilet! Eeek! I'm a puppet! Eeek! Eeek! Want banana!!
Does that cream your coffee, my meek, gullible friend? Good. Now go post your hate speech someplace else.
Being some sort of Nazi was a way to be normal back then, just as it is normal today to support the "war on terrorism" today. You don't ask, it's convention.
Turn back time a hundred years and think of the cultural progress of that time:
Sigmund Freud, nuclear research, aviation, abstract art and serial music. The predecessors of the nazis coined the phrase of "jewish modernism", providing conservative people with an answer to their fear. Even Einsteins theory was widely regarded as such "jewish modernism".
Someone mentioned the widespread attitude of "it's us or the russians", a construct so powerful that it was to last for years. Being afraid of the future is so common, it wasn't that hard to be a nazi at all.
It is in all of us like a latent potential.
Fear not!
09/??/1930: NSDAP 18.3 %
07/31/1932: NSDAP 37.3%
03/05/1933: NSDAP 44% being the main group of the Reichstag.
Jail the rest and you are Führer.
The Nazi's did not burn the Reichstag. In documents released in the late 80's it was shown that Hitler was quite surprised by its occurance. He just took advantage of the situation. So for ages people suspected he was behind it when he really wasn't.
...and spoil it. I'm going to see Copenhagen tommorow.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
The ALSOS mission is one of the most fascinating things in WWII. If you haven't looked into it, read The Hunt For German Scientists by Michael Bar-Zohar I believe, The Alsos Mission by Col. Boris Pash, and Alsos by Samuel Goudsmit.
Alsos was an intelligence operation to assess the German's science capabilities, in particular their nuclear fission program. It largely degenerates into commando raids and kidnapping (get the scientists before the Reds do!). A gripping read.
In the 1930's, back when about half of all European intellectuals were in favor of Fascism, my cousin Wassel was in a Biergarten badmouthing Hitler. The next day he came home to find that the authorities had ransacked his house, including cutting open all the pillows ostensibly searching for "subversive documents." The week after that, he was drafted into the army. Also, the best geneaological evidence indicates that this branch of my family converted from Judaism some time in the 19th century, so they would have gotten around to us eventually.
When I tell people this, they usually say, "gee, that was stupid of him."
Hindsight is 20-20, folks. It's really easy to look back on history and assign clear moral categories. It isn't so easy to do while the history is happening. A lot of people think that a Holocaust cannot happen again, but I think they're wrong. It can and probably will happen, because people are stupid. No genocide ever starts off horrible; it happens over time.
All these documents need to be put in the context of their times in order to make sense. Look at the time of the meeting, what had happened, and what was still in the future.
If you want to know where the next world-threatening Holocaust is going to come from, don't look for Nazis; look for the places that were like Germany between the wars: horrible unemployment, poverty, and inflation, hopelessness and despair, anger at treatment by their neighbors. These are invariably places that most liberal intellectuals loudly defend. There's a lot of "they're just responding to someone else's foreign policy" or "they have good reasons" or "how do you think they feel when they see..." There's a lot of rationalizing of madness. But these are the places that Holocaust-forming madness can take root, precisely because people want to view it all as rational and justifiable and will burn itself out once they get some control over their destiny. Ironically, it is this rationalization that makes it possible for madmen to get away with murder, but by then it's too late.
Does't matter anyway.
The result was as I said:
Jail them and you're Führer.
The Social Democrats got jailed, and --- oops there's our majority.
It was war against terrorism, actually.
Fear not.
From my reading of the current material, and of other sources:
1. Heisenberg took a substantial risk visiting Copenhagen and discussing secret and dangerous information with Bohr. We don't know exactly what was on his mind, but he wasn't doing this lightly.
2. Heisenberg didn't like his fascist government; but he was still a patriot and wanted to do what was good for his people in the long run.
3. In 1941, it was a very reasonable conclusion that Germany would win the war. Most people feared this. It would not be unreasonable to plan accordingly.
4. Heisenberg was very, very smart.
5. Bohr was troubled by what he saw as inconsistent and inexplicable behavior. He was surprised and concerned, at the time and later, and he sought in vain to understand his friend's words and actions, which seemed clear but inexplicable to him.
6. After the war, Heisenberg felt bitter and misunderstood, and avoided discussing wartime events after having received censure from many sides.
Assume, for the moment, that in 1941 Heisenberg a) thought Germany would win the war, b) hoped Bohr was aware how serious a threat was posed by nuclear weapons, c) wanted to prepare for good humane postwar German physics, and d) deliberately but secretly focused German research efforts on avenues leading to peaceful applications. How would his behavior have been different? Who would have been aware of this lonely struggle, at the time or later? And, assuming this were all true, how bitter and frustrated would he feel after the war, being blackguarded for actions that (if all were known) should be seen as heroic?
The historical record is clearly ambiguous, and there are certainly valid interpretations of events that show him in a bad or foolish light. But this was an extraordinary man, dealing with titanic issues at an extraordinary time. I am more inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. The great scientists I've known have tended to share a common trait: intellectual honesty, to the point of ruthlessness and even self-destruction if necessary. The great thinker is rarely petty of self-deceptive about important issues. So I have a hard time picturing Heisenberg conducting decades of revisionism to whitewash over bad behavior. I find it more likely that Bohr misunderstood his brief exchange with a troubled and tortured man, a man who was trying to do what he thought was right in a difficult situation. Bohr's own mystification with Heisenberg's actions is clear in the draft letters.
We won't ever have a certain resolution to this question, because letters and recordings only reveal certain kinds of information. The truth was hidden in Heisenberg's inner beliefs and motivations, but he chose to close the door on discussing such issues, after receiving what he perceived as unfair rebukes.
For me, it all comes down to a question of emotional and intellectual plausibility. Which 'plot' makes the most human sense -- Heisenberg as shallow, self-interested, incompetent, venal Nazi bureaucrat? -- or Heisenberg as an heroic, solitary, tortured visionary? Each version of history has problems, but look at the stature and reputation of this man before the war. He was larger than life. I hate to see him made so small in today's debate.
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
Now, admittedly no modern episodes have reached the scale of the Holocaust, but look at what has been going on the the states of the former Yugoslavia, in Rwanda, in the Northern parts of Iraq with the Kurds, and in other areas and you'd have to say that the concept of ethnic cleansing (same old horror, new buzzword) is alive and prospering.
It isn't a matter of if this happens, just if anyone takes notice and does anything about it. A lot of these get written off as "internal matters" or "civil wars" (oxymoron such as that is). The day that the international community stops excusing and allowing genocide under the guise of non-interference in the politics of nations is a day I'm not holding my breath waiting for. It would make for a much more palatable world if every innocent life had the same value, but to date there seems to be little data to support such a claim.
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
...but I assure you that you would prefer that the Allies won rather than the Nazis, the Empire of Japan and Fascist Italy if you had even the faintest appreciation of reading history before sharing your uninformed opinion. Try again, or at least don't make your ignorance so obvious in public. Not all opinions are equally worthwhile.
...your post summarizes to "it's unclear".
...that your penultimate paragraph was talking about the Nazis, and not Cold War America. It was, right?
...if "anybody that is ready to use an A-Bomb to conquer the world is [a] villain in (your) book", I would (as a Canadian from the province (Saskatchewan) whose uranium was processed into the enriched uranium and synthesized plutonium that made up Trinity, Fat Man and Little Boy tested and eventually used in New Mexico and Japan) respectfully submit that the United States used the atomic bomb on Japan to eliminate what would likely have been nearly a hundred thousand Allied casualties, as well as a further half million or more Japanese civilian deaths if the war had been prolonged with an Allied invasion of Japan under Overlord and Coronet scheduled for 1945 and 1946 respectively.
Truman was a bastard, but he was no villain. The same cannot be said of many of his successors nor of any of his equivalents in the Kremlin. Truman made a lot of mistakes, but this wasn't one of them.
...that Heisenberg was working on that weapon used so effectively from the second and higher stories of student residences at the University of Chicago and others... the Water Bomb!!!
That monster!
Yes, in a way, it *was* Niels Bohr who stopped the Nazi Bomb project!
[*]: Hmm -- wouldn't that make a good new name to call someone you want to say is both _boring_ and a _moron_?
Christian R. Conrad
mail me at iki.fi ; same user ID as here