Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS March Meeting 2021
Volume 66, Number 1
Monday–Friday, March 15–19, 2021; Virtual; Time Zone: Central Daylight Time, USA
Session C62: Farm Hall RevisitedInvited Live Undergrad Friendly
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Sponsoring Units: FHP Chair: Michel Janssen, University of Minnesota |
Monday, March 15, 2021 3:00PM - 3:36PM Live |
C62.00001: The Drama of Farm Hall Invited Speaker: David Cassidy This talk explores how turning the drama of Farm Hall into a play can bring to life the captured German scientists’ struggles with their past, with the news of Hiroshima, and with their uncertain futures, opening new perspectives on a crucial turning point in history and in physics. |
Monday, March 15, 2021 3:36PM - 4:12PM Live |
C62.00002: The Use and Abuse of Nuclear History: Farm Hall in Historical Memory Invited Speaker: Ryan Dahn 75 years later, the Farm Hall transcripts remain a singular source from the dawn of the atomic age, one which resembles a morality play: 10 prominent nuclear physicists, including Max von Laue, Werner Heisenberg, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, and Otto Hahn, contemplating the German defeat, their complicity in the Nazi war machine, and, after the news of the Hiroshima bomb arrived, whether they truly intended to build a nuclear weapon for Hitler. Sprinkled in amid all the moral ruminations are speculations on how to build an atomic bomb. |
Monday, March 15, 2021 4:12PM - 4:48PM Live |
C62.00003: Farm Hall: Did Heisenberg Understand How Atomic Bombs Worked? Invited Speaker: Mark Walker Werner Heisenberg, Nobel laureate and one of the founders of quantum mechanics, was also one of the most important scientists in the German research project into nuclear energy and nuclear weapons during World War II. A controversy has raged since the end of this war over Heisenberg’s understanding of how an atomic bomb would work, ranging from accusations of incompetence to claims of resistance against Hitler, with several other variants in between. This talk will explain what we do and do not know about this, including a suggestion as to what questions we should be asking. |
Monday, March 15, 2021 4:48PM - 5:24PM Live |
C62.00004: Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker and Farm Hall Invited Speaker: Dieter Hoffmann Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker (1912-2007) - a student, colleague and friend of Werner Heisenberg - was a leading physicist of the German nuclear project during the Third Reich and was among the ten German internees in Farm Hall. There he was not only one of the younger generation, but also someone who dominated the discussions there, in particular those of political nature. Just after Hiroshima he argued that "the peaceful development of the uranium engine was made in Germany under the Hitler regime, whereas the Americans and the English developed the ghastly weapon of war." The time he spent in Farm Hall also became instrumental for his thinking about the political responsibility of scientists and in particular of physicists during the atomic age. It was no coincidence that he became one of the main initiators of the so called Goettingen declaration of 18 (West)German atomic physicists against the development of nuclear weapons in Germany in 1957, and his profiling as a pioneer of freedom- and conflict-research, which shaped the last decades of his academic life, was also rooted in the discussions and contemplations of Farm Hall. |
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