Yet Russell's quarrel with Einstein must have been by far the richest and the most important. In a “Note on Non-Demonstrative Inference and Induction,” which Russell dictated to his wife in 1959, he offers a tantalizing clue: “My beliefs about induction underwent important modifications in the year 1944, chiefly owing to the discovery that induction used without common sense leads more often to false conclusions than to true ones.” He goes on to distinguish between pure induction and what he calls “scientific common sense.” Induction, indeed, does not figure in the “extralogical postulates” required by scientific inference. Here, Russell shows himself to be an empiricist (as ever) with a difference: Induction is “invalid as a logical principle” because it so easily falls into fallacy. Russell's examples of induction going wrong include the following: “No man alive has died, therefore probably all men alive are immortal.”68
Had Russell in fact given up empiricism, Einstein would have been delighted. In his contribution to the Library of Living Philosophers volume on Russell, published in 1944, Einstein bluntly objected to the Humean “fear of metaphysics” in Russell. Of course, Einstein was quite right. After abandoning Plato in his youth, Russell never let go of the empirical impulse. In a way, the gulf between Russell and Einstein was not enormous. Neither subscribed to what Einstein called the two illusions: “the unlimited penetrative power of thought” and “naïve realism, according to which things ‘are’ as they are perceived through our senses.”69 Einstein agreed that “thought acquires material content only through its relationship with… sensory material”—a statement that sounds suspiciously acquiescent to empiricism. But he rejected any attempt to base thought upon material reality, arguing that the “free creations of thought” are sufficiently valid if they are merely “connected with sensory experiences.” That is, thought is not created out of material things or the perceptions of material things. But thought can contribute to knowledge only if it coincides with the “sense experience” that comes to us from what is material. Einstein was, to borrow his own words, on the thought side of the “gulf—logically unbridgeable—which separates the world of sensory experiences from the world of concepts and propositions.”70
The format of each volume of The Library of Living Philosophers requires that the subject “reply” to each essay. Russell dutifully replied to Einstein's contribution. Russell's few words are respectful and pointed. He agreed with Einstein that the “fear of metaphysics is the contemporary malady”—lamentable especially for the tendency of contemporary philosophers to swallow empiricism wholesale, without “prob[ing] questions to the bottom.” Still, Russell approached the “gulf” between metaphysics and empiricism with a “bias… towards empiricism.” He is thus quick to refute Einstein's assertion that number is an example of the “free creations of thought.”71 As one contrary instance, Russell offered the obvious correlation between the decimal system and our ten fingers. For Einstein, desperately clinging to the hope of a mathematical solution to his unified field theory, Russell's empirical bent must have been an unpleasant reminder of those abandoned “generalizable facts” upon which his relativity theories were based.72
In 1949, Russell wrote “Einstein and the Theory of Relativity” for a BBC broadcast. In it, Russell praised modern physics for its “desire to avoid introducing into physics anything that, by its very nature, must be unobservable.” The consequence has been more abstraction in physics, as no longer are we permitted “to make pictures to ourselves of what goes on in atoms, or indeed of anything in the physical world.” The tongue-in-cheek of this quip aside, Russell put his finger on the paradox of evidence in physics. What Russell wanted was less of the unobservable to count as science: “[S]o long as the technique of science can survive, every diminution in the number of unobservables that are assumed is a gain. In this sense, Einstein took a long step forward.”73 Russell had recast Occam's razor* to fit modern physics, but how that law of parsimony can be reconciled with scientific creativity, much less a “theory of everything,” is hard to know.
If Einstein did waver in his commitment to experience, he never fully gave it up. Asked by Scientific American to explain his most recent unified field theory in nontechnical terms, Einstein obliged. The result, a difficult and abstract article published in 1950, conceded as much:
The skeptic will say, “It may well be true that this system of equations is reasonable from a logical standpoint. But this does not prove that it corresponds to nature.” You are right, dear skeptic. Experience alone can decide on truth.74
* William of Occam admonished, “Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate,” which can be translated, loosely, as “Strip away unnecessary things.”
PART 4
BEYOND PATHOS:
OPPENHEIMER,
HEISENBERG, AND
THE WAR
As Einstein and his friends in Princeton spoke quietly of philosophy and science, many of their colleagues were busy pushing physics toward brute power. In Los Alamos and in Germany, physicists raced to build the first atom bomb. Whoever succeeded would gain certain victory: The heart of London or Berlin could be destroyed in a moment. Neither Einstein nor his fellow physicist Pauli worked on the atom bomb, but both knew what their colleagues were doing. It was a small, tight-knit world. Oppenheimer, who directed the Los Alamos effort, had been Pauli's student. Werner Heisenberg, who led the German bomb project, was Pauli's closest collaborator. They had been friends since their college days in Munich. When it came down to the atom, everyone knew everyone else.
WARTIME BERLIN, WINTER 1943–44
IN DECEMBER 1943, WERNER HEISENBERG paid a visit to Krakow at the invitation of Hans Frank, then the Nazi governor general of occupied Poland.1 Frank, a schoolmate of Heisenberg's brother, had extended the invitation in May 1943, having invented a “Copernicus Prize” for Heisenberg as an enticement. Delayed for various reasons, Heisenberg finally accepted, with the promise, too, of a lecture for Frank's newly minted Institut fur Deutsche Ostarbeit (literally, Institute for German East Studies, a “think tank” for eastern colonization).
Frank had fallen from Nazi grace the previous year after a lecture critical of unconstitutional rule. That lecture saw him stripped of his prestigious title Reichskommissar, but left his governorship of Poland intact. In such disdain did Hitler hold Poland that he thought it punishment enough to let Frank languish there.
Exiled he might have been. But he did not languish. He had already appropriated for his living quarters the luxuriously appointed Wawel Castle, where he entertained lavishly and famously. Known as the “butcher of Poles” (later executed at Nuremburg in 1946), he extorted from his governorship all that he could: lavish feasts for friends, furs for his wife and his lover, money in the bank. (Among the charges of corruption floated during party infighting was the charge, easily documented, that Frank and his wife “shopped” in the Jewish ghetto, where discounts naturally abounded.) Frank despised Poles, whom he saw as fodder for slavery and extermination; and he exhorted his fellow Germans to exterminate Jews in a blunt, brutal 1941 speech.
In recollection, Heisenberg confided to the historian David Irving that he was struck by Frank's queries about a “miracle weapon, perhaps atomic bombs” in the possession of the Allies.2Heisenberg seems to have recalled little about his own talk at Frank's Institut fur Deutsche Ostarbeit. Presumably, he lectured on quantum theory. Nor did he recall seeing or hearing anything untoward. Yet he must have listened to the outspoken Frank boast of his successes in dealing with the “Jewish question.” Frank's castle was about fifty miles from Auschwitz.
It was hardly surprising that Hans Frank might think to ask about an atomic bomb. Whether he had in mind a “miracle” weapon for the fatherland or feared that the Allies might have their own, Frank, like most laypeople, would have heard all about “splitting the atom” and the possibilities of atomic energy.
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.
HEISENBERG
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.3 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.”4
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.5
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?6 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.8 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, killi
ng a number of slave laborers.9 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.10 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.”11
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.
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