Serving the Reich Page 3
The scientific pre-eminence of Germany before the war was not limited to physics. It had dominated chemistry throughout the nineteenth century, thanks to pioneers such as Justus von Liebig, Friedrich August Kekulé, Adolf von Baeyer and August Wilhelm von Hofmann. The German chemists displayed an enviable aptitude for converting their laboratory discoveries into the mass products of a thriving chemical industry. Dyestuffs, pharmaceuticals, fertilizers and photographic products were the mainstay of powerful German industrial companies such as Hoechst, Bayer, BASF and Agfa. At the start of the twentieth century, Emil Fischer at the University of Berlin (Nobel laureate 1902) was arguably the world’s foremost organic chemist, while physical chemistry was dominated by Wilhelm Ostwald at Leipzig (Nobel laureate 1909). In physiology, Wilhelm Roux, Hans Spemann and Hans Driesch had made embryology a true science, and the controversial zoologist Ernst Haeckel at Jena had spread the word of Darwinism throughout Germany. In medicine, Robert Koch at Berlin pioneered the understanding of tuberculosis; his one-time assistant Paul Ehrlich helped to launch synthetic pharmaceuticals with the anti-syphilis drug Salvarsan.
Yet even before the First World War, concerns were expressed that German science was in danger of losing its dominant position. In 1909 a seemingly unlikely champion of science, the theologian and historian Adolf von Harnack, argued that the appearance of privately funded scientific institutions in the United States, such as the Carnegie Institution in Washington DC, might leave Germany in the shade. That kind of private enterprise might work for the Americans, but it was not in the German tradition. At the end of the nineteenth century the minister for university affairs, Friedrich Althoff, proposed that a state-funded ‘colony’ of scientific institutes be set up in Berlin-Dahlem—a kind of German Oxford, affiliated with the universities but independent of them.
This plan cohered in 1911 with the formation of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, KWG), of which Harnack was the first president. It was funded partly by industry and partly by the government, and was intended to foster both pure and applied scientific research in an environment that freed the scientists from teaching responsibilities. In contrast to the universities, appointments to the KWG institutes were determined not by the state but by the scientists themselves—the state ministries simply rubber-stamped the decisions. This separation from the university system was to prove critical to the KWG’s operation during the Nazi era, for it meant that, unlike university professors, staff at the society’s institutes were in general not formally state-employed civil servants. The KWG evolved into a semi-private*5 organization with over thirty institutes by the end of the 1920s.
The first two of these research centres, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes for Chemistry (KWIC) and Physical Chemistry (KWIPC), were opened in Berlin-Dahlem in 1912 by the emperor in person. The institutes that followed were primarily biological and medical: botany, zoology, microbiology, physiology. Physics was not a priority. The precedence awarded to chemistry reflected its industrial importance; the KWIPC was financed by the Jewish banker and entrepreneur Leopold Koppel, a senator of the KWG. Koppel made this endowment contingent on the institute’s director being the Jewish German chemist Fritz Haber, who had demonstrated the importance of chemistry for industry and agriculture by developing, between the mid-1890s and 1913, a catalytic process for turning atmospheric nitrogen into fertilizer. Haber’s method, which won him a Nobel Prize in 1918, was modified for industrial-scale production by Carl Bosch at BASF. Bosch went on to win a Nobel in 1931 for his work on chemical processing at high pressures, and he became president of the KWG in 1937. The First World War lent fresh significance to the Haber—Bosch process, which was given over largely to the production of nitrogen-rich explosives rather than fertilizer. It has been said that, without this chemical technology, the war would have been over in a year through lack of munitions. At the KWIPC Haber undertook wartime research on the production of chlorine and other poisonous gases for chemical warfare. By 1917 the institute (which is today named after Haber) had grown to house 1,500 personnel, including 150 scientists.
But the war and the political instabilities of its aftermath severely disrupted the aspirations of the KWG and threatened to choke this attempt to revitalize German research. ‘At the moment the outlook for our German science is very bleak,’ Planck wrote in 1919. ‘But I cling strongly to the hope that it will again reach the top . . . if only we can get through the next difficult years decently.’ Planck could have no inkling just how difficult those years would become, nor how hard it would be to retain decency.
After the humiliation of the war, supporting science was not just a desirable economic investment but also a way of regaining national prestige. And how deeply humiliating it was. The harshly punitive Treaty of Versailles compelled Germany to pay the fantastic sum of 269 billion gold marks (later reduced, although still it fuelled German hyperinflation), stripped it of territories in Alsace, Upper Silesia, North Schleswig and elsewhere, deprived it of its colonies, allowed it only a tiny army and almost no navy, and excluded it from the League of Nations. The treaty also undermined the support within Germany for the liberal Weimar government that had brokered it.
Unlike Einstein, most scientists and academics responded to this disgrace by turning inward, attempting to salvage some pride by asserting the moral superiority of German culture. The nation might have been broken and humbled by the war, Planck told the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1918, ‘but there is one thing which no foreign or domestic enemy has yet taken from us: that is the position which German science occupies in the world’.
This nationalism, often bordering on chauvinism, was in part a defensive reaction to a vindictive international boycott on German science and scientists after the war. The newly formed International Research Council decided to exclude Germans and Austrians from its committees, meetings and projects. In Britain and the United States the wisdom of this counterproductive gesture was questioned in the 1920s, and by 1926 the council was persuaded to open its doors again to the Germans. Stung by the preceding snub, they refused the invitation. Instead of tempering its cultural isolation by seeking to engage in international affairs, Germany became yet more nationalist and isolationist, insisting stridently on the uniqueness and primacy of German science. Science, Planck insisted, ‘just like art and religion, can in the first instance grow properly only on national soil. Only when such a basis has been established is a fruitful union of the nations in high-minded competition possible.’
Stripped of political power, German leaders and researchers sought to substitute scientific prestige in its place. Even before the war, Harnack’s report calling for the establishment of specialized research institutes had been viewed as a quasi-military political strategy, being summarized thus by the Prussian Ministry of Education and the Reich Interior Ministry:
For Germany the maintenance of its scientific hegemony is just as much a necessity for the state as is the superiority of its army. A decline in Germany’s scientific prestige reacts upon Germany’s national repute and national influence in all other fields, leaving entirely out of the account the eminent importance for our economy of a superiority in particular fields of science.
This being so, it was the duty of German scientists to act as ambassadors for their country: to impress on the world the strengths and virtues of German science. Einstein’s internationalism, which claimed that science was an enterprise without borders and independent of one’s country or creed, was considered unpatriotic and distasteful.
When Planck pronounced his gloomy prognosis in 1919, the fissiparous Weimar government was sailing towards economic disaster. Within just a few years, hyperinflation had made nonsense of the mark and the country stood on the brink of total dissolution. In 1923 the cost of a loaf of bread rose into the millions of marks; what could be purchased when you got your wages could become unaffordable by the time you got to the shops. Planck once found, while on a trip as secretary of the Prussian Academy of Scienc
es, that the money he had been given for expenses when he set off on the train was not enough by the time he arrived at his destination to cover the cost of a hotel room for the night, forcing the 65-year-old to sit up all night in the station waiting room.
In those circumstances, where could money be found to keep German science alive, let alone to restore it to pole position? The KWG*6 was compelled to go begging to the Prussian state. In 1920 Harnack and Planck, who had been elected to the society’s senate in 1916, enlisted the support of the former culture minister of Prussia to establish the Emergency Association of German Science, an organization that would gather funds for research. Although some money was granted by the state and some by industry, a fecund source was identified abroad. The Rockefeller Foundation in the United States, founded in 1913 by the industrialist and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, rose above the international boycott of German science to honour its declared intent of promoting ‘the well-being of mankind throughout the world’, and it entered into negotiations to realize Harnack’s vision of creating a nucleus of scientific institutes.
Wind of change
The Weimar government was never less popular than in the early 1920s, leading even liberals to express some nostalgia for the more authoritarian culture of imperial rule. Bavaria had been particularly fragile politically since the end of the war, wavering between extremes. The far-left Independent Socialists led by Kurt Eisner had gained control in 1918, but were inept at governance, and elections the following year handed a majority to the right-wing Bavarian People’s Party. When Eisner was shot by a far-right extremist in February 1919, there was fighting on the streets of Munich. An unusually cold winter, in which snow persisted until May, exacerbated the shortages of food and fuel. The unrest continued until 1923, culminating with an attempted putsch against the local government by the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP), led by Adolf Hitler. The uprising was suppressed and its ringleader imprisoned, but not before Munich was shaken by more violence. During his prison sentence, Hitler spelt out his vision of political struggle:
The nationalization of the great masses can never take place by way of half measures, by a weak emphasis upon a so-called objective viewpoint, but by a ruthless and fanatically one-sided orientation as to the goal to be aimed at . . . One can only succeed in winning the soul of a people if . . . one also destroys at the same time the supporter of the contrary.
After the unrest in Bavaria (and elsewhere) dissipated, the Weimar government was granted a brief respite from its travails. The economy at last began to settle, and the worst fears of the middle and upper classes—that there would be a Communist revolution—failed to materialize. This was the ‘golden age’ that the Weimar era rather selectively evokes in the popular image today: the time of the Bauhaus, jazz, artistic and sexual permissiveness. That was perhaps how it seemed to Berlin bohemians, but very few academics and scientists partook of this hedonistic culture, which they tended to regard with the suspicion and contempt of the elite for the vulgar.
The period of grace ended in 1930, when the federal elections exposed the schism between the creeping extremes of German political life. The National Socialists enjoyed a surge in support, gaining 18 per cent of the vote: 107 of the 577 seats in the German parliament (Reichstag), compared to just twelve in the elections two years earlier. The Social Democratic Party retained its majority, but with only thirty-six more seats than the Nazis, and was hindered by disagreements with the third-placed Communist Party. Thus the Social Democrats could claim no mandate; they could barely govern at all. In the political chaos that followed, support for the National Socialists blossomed. Increasingly they seemed the only party capable of exercising firm rule. Hitler blamed the turmoil on the Jewish bankers and Communist agitators. Naked anti-Semitic sentiment rose like dross to the surface.
That year Adolf von Harnack died, and Max Planck was elected president of the KWG. He thereby became the de facto figurehead of German science, its captain against the gathering storm.
2
‘Physics must be rebuilt’
Quantum theory, with its paradoxes and uncertainties, its mysteries and challenges to intuition, is something of a refuge for scoundrels and charlatans, as well as a fount of more serious but nonetheless fantastic speculation. Could it explain consciousness? Does it undermine causality? Everything from homeopathy to mind control and manifestations of the paranormal has been laid at its seemingly tolerant door.
Mostly that represents a blend of wishful thinking, misconception and pseudoscience. Because quantum theory defies common sense and ‘rational’ expectation, it can easily be hijacked to justify almost any wild idea. The extracurricular uses to which quantum theory has been put tend inevitably to reflect the preoccupations of the times: in the 1970s parallels were drawn with Zen Buddhism, today alternative medicine and theories of mind are in vogue.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that fundamental aspects of quantum physics are still not fully understood, and it has genuinely profound philosophical implications. Many of these aspects were evident to the early pioneers of the field—indeed, in the transformation of scientific thought that quantum theory compelled, they were impossible to ignore. Yet while several of the theory’s persistent conundrums were identified in its early days, one can’t say that the physicists greatly distinguished themselves in their response. This is hardly surprising: neither scientists nor philosophers in the early twentieth century had any preparation for thinking in the way quantum physics demands, and if the physicists tended to retreat into vagueness, near-tautology and mysticism, the philosophers and other intellectuals often just misunderstood the science.
This penchant for pondering the deeper meanings of quantum theory was particularly evident in Germany, proud of its long tradition of philosophical enquiry into nature and reality. The British, American and Italian physicists, in contrast, tended to conform to their stereotypical national pragmatism in dealing with quantum matters. But even if they were rather more content to apply the mathematics and not wonder too hard about the ontology, these other scientists relied strongly on the Germanic nations for those theoretical formulations in the first place. Germany, more than any other country, showed how to turn the microscopic fragmentation of nature into a useful, predictive, quantitative and explanatory science. If you were a theoretical physicist in Germany, it was hard to resist the gravitational pull of quantum theory: where Planck and Einstein led, Arnold Sommerfeld, Peter Debye, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli and others followed.
This being so, it was inevitable that the philosophical aspects of quantum physics should have been coloured by the political and social preoccupations of Germany. As we shall see, it was not the only part of physics to become politicized. These tendencies rocked the ivory tower: the kind of science you pursued became a statement about the sort of person you were, and the sympathies you harboured.
Unpeeling the atom
The realization that light and energy were granular had profound implications for the emerging understanding of how atoms are constituted. In 1907 New Zealander Ernest Rutherford, working at Manchester University in England, found that most of the mass of an atom is concentrated in a small, dense nucleus with a positive electrical charge. He concluded that this kernel was surrounded by a cloud of electrons, the particles found in 1897 to be the constituents of cathode rays by J. J. Thomson at Cambridge. Electrons possess a negative electrical charge that collectively balances the positive charge of the nucleus. In 1911 Rutherford proposed that the atom is like a solar system in miniature, a nuclear sun orbited by planetary electrons, held there not by gravity but by electrical attraction.
But there was a problem with that picture. According to classical physics, the orbiting electrons should radiate energy as electromagnetic rays, and so would gradually relinquish their orbits and spiral into the nucleus: the atom should rapidly decay. In 1913 the 28-year-old
Danish physicist Niels Bohr showed that the notion of quantization—discreteness of energy—could solve this problem of atomic stability, and at the same time account for the way atoms absorb and emit radiation. The quantum hypothesis gave Bohr permission to prohibit instability by fiat: if the electron energies can only take discrete, quantized values, he said, then this gradual leakage of energy is prevented: the particles remain orbiting indefinitely. Electrons can lose energy, but only by making a hop (‘quantum jump’) to an orbit of lower energy, shedding the difference in the form of a photon of a specific wavelength. By the same token, an electron can gain energy and jump to a higher orbit by absorbing a photon of the right wavelength. Bohr went on to postulate that each orbit can accommodate only a fixed number of electrons, so that downward jumps are impossible unless a vacancy arises.
It was well established experimentally that atoms do absorb and emit radiation at particular, well-defined wavelengths. Light passing through a gas has ‘missing wavelengths’—a series of dark, narrow bands in the spectrum. The emission spectrum of the same vapour is made up of corresponding bright bands, accounting for example for the characteristic red glow of neon and the yellow glare of sodium vapour when they are stimulated by an electrical discharge. These photons absorbed or emitted, said Bohr, have energies precisely equal to the energy difference between two electron orbits.