Session L05: Pais Prize Session: Farm Hall

Live

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.   

Not Participating

At the end of World War II, British agents held 10 captured German atomic scientists at Farm Hall for a period before, during, and after the atomic bombing of Japan. The scientists’ recorded conversations and later statements and documents released over the years have sparked repeated controversy about the German nuclear effort. After 75 years, what do we now know? What don’t we know? And what is the legacy of Farm Hall?   

Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker and Farm Hall

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, in particular those of A 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 Gottingen declaration of 18 (West) German atomic physicists against the development of nuclear weapons in Germany in 1957, and his profile 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. The talk will discuss the central place of Farm Hall in the life and work of Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker.