Ask and ye shall receive. Let’s talk about Werner Heisenberg, Nazi collaborator, and how he tried to cover it up after the war. (1/n) https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1338539672981671936

Werner Heisenberg was unquestionably brilliant. He had the key inspiration that led to the first full-blown theory of quantum mechanics, and later developed his eponymous uncertainty principle. But he was also a coward who helped the Nazis try to build a nuclear bomb.

Shortly after WWII broke out, Heisenberg—who had been offered and declined many chances to leave Germany and work literally anywhere else—was chosen as one of the leaders of the Nazi nuclear program.

He wasn’t coerced into this. He was actually at a conference in Michigan weeks before the war started (where he was offered and declined yet another position in the US) and he left early for “machine gun practice in the Bavarian Alps.”

To be clear, Heisenberg wasn’t actually a member of the Nazi party. He just thought he could work with the Nazis, get them to fund interesting physics, and disregard the wider consequences. He said he wanted to “make use of warfare for physics.”

But of course, it didn’t work out that way. The Nazis used him. They asked him to build a bomb, and he tried, all the way up to the end of the war in the spring of 1945, to get a sustained nuclear chain reaction going, to help Hitler and the Nazis win the war.

He was eventually captured by the Allies and, along with other physicists and leaders of the Nazi nuclear effort, whisked away to Farm Hall, an English manor house, until the end of the war several months later.

He was utterly astonished when he heard that the US had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. At first, he didn’t believe it at all, because he was just so certain that German science was the best in the world.

But eventually he came to understand that he had been beaten, at which point he almost instantly changed strategies. For the rest of his life, he told anyone who would listen that he hadn’t REALLY been trying to build a bomb for the Nazis.

Instead, he said, he’d just been trying to build a nuclear reactor, for use in peacetime, unwilling to hand Hitler such a terribly destructive weapon. And a lot of people believed him, for many years. There were even books written about heroic Heisenberg, secret Nazi resister.

There was just one problem with Heisenberg’s story: it wasn’t true at all. There was, in fact, ironclad evidence that it was false. Remember Farm Hall, that manor house? The English had bugged it.

(One of the other physicists there actually asked Heisenberg if he thought the house was bugged. "Microphones installed?" Heisenberg laughed. "Oh no, they're not as cute as all that. I don't think they know the real Gestapo methods, they're a bit old fashioned in that respect.")

When the transcripts were finally declassified in the 90s, the whole thing came out. Heisenberg and his buddies hadn’t even known how to build a bomb. They weren’t innocent—they were just incompetent.

They’d clearly tried hard to build a bomb, and then a reactor, but had made crucial miscalculations. Heisenberg was a great theoretical physicist, but he was a notoriously awful experimenter. Heisenberg didn't have any great moral clarity; he'd just (fortunately!) screwed up.

And when they had finally realized that they were beaten to the punch, Heisenberg and co. immediately put together a lie, the one they’d repeat for decades: we were secretly working against Hitler the whole time!

The Farm Hall transcripts also revealed Heisenberg’s phenomenally over-inflated sense of his own importance. Before they heard about Hiroshima, Heisenberg and the others at Farm Hall thought that Truman, Stalin, and Churchill were specifically negotiating over their fate!

In short, Heisenberg was a willing fascist collaborator, he failed solely through his own incompetence, and after the fact he lied that he’d been resisting all along. Can’t imagine any reason why this story would be particularly relevant these days...

If you liked this, and want to read more about the seamy underbelly of quantum physics, you might want to check out my book. You can still get it before Hanukkah ends: https://www.amazon.com/What-Real-Unfinished-Meaning-Quantum/dp/1541698975