What Did Bohr Do at Los Alamos? | Hacker News Reader

What Did Bohr Do at Los Alamos?

blog.nuclearsecrecy.com

122 pointsdanso12 comments

Richard Feynman provides a little color to Bohr's visit.[0]

[0] https://books.google.com/books?id=7papZR4oVssC&pg=PA132&lpg=...

Willingness to discuss and critically evaluate ideas no matter who they come from, rather than blindly following people off a cliff due to fame, is a critically useful skill.

Sadly, so is recognizing when you're working with a person who wants that and when you're working with someone whose ego and unwillingness to admit mistakes thrives on blind followers. Mistaking the former for the latter can be a career-limiting moment.

If you ever have the chance, I highly recommend Michael Frayn's amazing Copenhagen, one of the best and most intellectually stimulating plays I've ever seen. The irony that anti-Semites relegated Jewish physicists like Bohr to the "unappealing" theoretical roles, and that theoretical physics would turn out to be key to the war, is almost better than fiction. And that's only one of the many amazing concepts Frayn plays with.

The irony that anti-Semites relegated Jewish physicists like Bohr to the "unappealing" theoretical roles [...]

What gave you that impression? They simply fired all the Jewish scientists from their positions, theoretical or not. The abundance of scientists of Jewish descent in early 20th century physics is not because antisemites made them take up theoretical physics - the methods were much less subtle.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik :

"Lenard began a core campaign to label Einstein's Relativity as Jewish Physics. Lenard and Stark enjoyed the Nazi support because it allowed them to undertake a professional coup for their preferred scientific theory. Under the rallying cry that physics should be more "German" and "Aryan," Lenard and Stark, with backing from the Nazi leadership, entered on a plan to pressure and replace physics positions at German universities with people teaching their preferred theories. By the late 1930s, there were no longer any Jewish physics professors in Germany, since under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 Jews were not allowed to work in universities."

"It is occasionally put forth that there is a great irony in the Nazis' labeling modern physics as "Jewish science", since it was exactly modern physics—and the work of many European exiles—which was used to create the atomic bomb. Even if the German government had not embraced Lenard and Stark's ideas, the German antisemitic agenda was enough by itself to destroy the Jewish scientific community in Germany."

Right. None of this says "Jewish scientists were relegated to unappealing theoretical roles". Atomic physics (which, incidentally, Lenard had no quarrel with) was hot stuff, Einstein was a global superstar well before Nazis came to have significant influence, etc. When they did gain influence, they just started getting rid of Jewish scientists, among others. Take a look at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_for_the_Restoration_of_the_...

I came across this the other day; it may be relevant to this discussion:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Heisenberg#The_Deutsche_Physik_movement

Bohr was Danish. I've never heard that antisemitism should have had any influence over his career choice or options.

In Germany, Jewish scientist were fired, but this never happened in Denmark. Even after the German occupation of Denmark in 1940, Bohr kept his job. In 1943 the Germans decided to round up all Jews in Denmark and send them to concentration camps. Luckily most of them (including Bohr) escaped to Sweden. But until this point there were no discriminatory policies in place.

Very good--and ambiguous--play. There's been a fair amount of historical research on the meeting but the play itself is ambiguous enough that it doesn't really matter what actually happened. There's a 2002 BBC production that is probably available. If you're in the Boston area, the Central Square Theater has a production next year.

How was theoretical physics key to the war?

It wasnt the key to WWII but rather the punctuation mark to the end of it. But it also fueled every proxy war for the next 50 years.

"On one occasion, subjects proceeded across a busy intersection against the red light in a diagonal fashion, taking the longest route possible and one of greatest danger. The resourceful work of Agent Maiers in blocking out one half of the stream of automobile traffic with his car..."

It's both funny and sad (totalitarian spying state, where spies are allowed to break laws).

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