Operation Epsilon.

IF 0.6 2区 哲学 Q2 HISTORY & PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
Mark Walker
{"title":"Operation Epsilon.","authors":"Mark Walker","doi":"10.1002/bewi.202300009","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>Review of Dieter Hoffmann (ed.), Operation Epsilon: Die Farm-Hall-Protokolle erstmals vollständig, ergänzt um zeitgenössische Briefe und weitere Dokumente der 1945 in England internierten deutschen Atomforscher, 2nd edn. (Diepholz: GNT-Verlag, 2023), 588 pages, 57 figures, notes, bibliography, index, ISBN 978-3-86225-111-7, 44,80 €.</p><p>At the end of the Second World War Allied forces arrested ten German scientists and interned them in a British country house named Farm Hall. Most of these scientists had been connected to the “uranium project,” research into the technical and military applications of nuclear fission. The scientists’ conversations were overheard via hidden microphones, selectively transcribed, translated, and distributed to a few people as secret reports. The original recordings were not saved, and with a few exceptions, the original German conversations were not included.</p><p>The Farm Hall transcripts have a long history. They were first used in print by the physicist Samuel Goudsmit in his popular 1947 book <i>Alsos</i>. Goudsmit, who had been part of the Alsos Mission scientific-intelligence gathering mission sent to Europe to find and neutralize any German atomic bomb, argued that the Nazis had ruined German science, with the wartime German uranium project as his main example. Although Goudsmit clearly read and used the transcripts, he did not explicitly reveal their existence.<sup>1</sup> This became clear in 1962 when the former general in charge of the American Manhattan Project, Leslie Groves, quoted from the transcripts in his memoirs.<sup>2</sup> Indeed Groves appears to have gone out of his way to select some of the most embarrassing and unflattering quotations in order to discredit the German scientists.</p><p>When in 1989/1990 this author published his book on the uranium project, a revised version of his dissertation,<sup>3</sup> it appeared that the Farm Hall transcripts might never appear. In fact, they were released shortly thereafter in 1992. They quickly appeared in two English-language editions: a straight-forward publication of the transcripts by the British physicist Charles Frank and an extensively annotated version by the American physicist Jeremy Bernstein. Both editions have problems.</p><p>In his introduction, Frank argued that “Heisenberg's estimate [at Farm Hall] of the critical mass for a nuclear explosion in <sup>235</sup>U,” which was a “gross overestimate,” was “of crucial importance for determining German nuclear energy policy during the war.” Here Frank subtly misquotes Heisenberg (or at least the transcripts) by writing that “he never worked it out properly,”<sup>4</sup> when in fact according to the Farm Hall transcripts Heisenberg said: “[…] quite honestly I have never worked it out as I never believed that one could get pure ‘235.’”<sup>5</sup> Like many other readers of these transcripts, Frank also did not take into account both how shocked and skeptical the scientists initially were.</p><p>In contrast to the first publication of the Farm Hall transcripts, Jeremy Bernstein's edition includes extensive commentary, especially with regard to physics. Bernstein approached this work as a physicist doing history rather than a historian of physics. Instead of reconstructing the historical context of Heisenberg's statements and calculations about atomic bombs, for example what Heisenberg had done and said during the war, how far the uranium research had proceeded, what information had been available to him, or what he had been tasked to do, Bernstein simply asked whether the physics was correct, using the high standards of either what the Manhattan Project scientists finally achieved, or current physical knowledge, in order to conclude that the “Germans had no comprehensive understanding of bomb physics.”<sup>6</sup> Bernstein thereby squandered much of the historical significance of the Farm Hall transcripts. Indeed, the most important evidence for what happened during the war comes from the war, not the subsequent postwar period. Wartime sources make clear that Heisenberg's understanding of the critical mass of an atomic bomb, whatever that was, was in fact not crucial for the development of the uranium project.<sup>7</sup></p><p>The Farm Hall transcripts have also inspired theater. Michael Frayn's award-winning and influential play <i>Copenhagen</i> includes material gleaned from Farm Hall.<sup>8</sup> The historian of science David Cassidy has both published a play based on Farm Hall and commented on the advantages and disadvantages of this genre for bringing historical events to the general public.<sup>9</sup></p><p>Because with few exceptions the original German dialogue has been lost, the German edition of the Farm Hall transcripts is mostly composed of retranslations of the recorded conversations. Editing and publishing the first edition of this book in 1993 was a controversial, if not courageous thing for an East German scholar to do during the turbulent years immediately following the opening of the Berlin wall and fall of communism. Hoffmann's introduction provides a very good survey of the German wartime work, showing that they understood the essential fundamentals of atomic bombs. Hoffmann's perceptive analysis of the conversations in Farm Hall reveals that, step by step, the scientists moved towards a consensus that would help them navigate the “politics of the past” (<i>Vergangenheitspolitik</i>) in the postwar era, encapsulated by Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker's argument that they had not wanted to build atomic bombs. Both editions of <i>Operation Epsilon</i> include an extensive 1992 interview with Weizsäcker, which is important and especially interesting because it documents one of the first times that Weizsäcker tried to engage with the work of scholars (including this reviewer) who had called his earlier accounts of the German uranium work into question. The new revised second edition includes a few more passages from Farm Hall as well as over 100 pages of additional valuable historical sources: the diaries of Erich Bagge and Otto Hahn, correspondence from Walther Gerlach, Werner Heisenberg, Max von Laue, and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, and two reports regarding Lise Meitner and the wartime German nuclear research composed by Hahn.</p><p>If the transcripts ironically do not reveal much about the uranium research during the war, what do they tell us? The British wardens at Farm Hall detected the lingering effect of National Socialist ideology on the scientists. When the detainees were lent a copy of <i>Life</i> magazine containing articles on the atom bomb and a number of photographs of the scientists who had worked on it, Weizsäcker remarked that naturally most were Germans. For the British commander, Weizsäcker's claim, which was in fact false, demonstrated that the scientists still believed in the master race. Indeed with the possible exception of Max von Laue, he thought that applied to every one of the guests.<sup>10</sup> As Jeremy Bernstein has pointed out, ironically many of the scientists portrayed were in fact Jewish.<sup>11</sup> Even Heisenberg made a remarkable comparison between the Allied officials who had interned the Germans and were deciding their fate and some of the most infamous men in the Third Reich. While some officials were extremely friendly towards the German scientists, Heisenberg compared others, who supposedly wanted to keep the Germans locked up in Farm Hall, to Reinhard Heydrich and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the two men who had served as second-in-command of the SS.<sup>12</sup></p><p>In fact, the scientists interned at Farm Hall expressed very different opinions about the worst excesses of National Socialism. Erich Bagge argued that if the Germans had put people in concentration camps during the war and if Hitler had ordered a few atrocities in concentration camps during the last few years of the conflict, then these excesses had occurred under the stress of war.<sup>13</sup> In contrast, Karl Wirtz stated flatly that he and his countrymen had done unprecedented things. In Poland the SS had driven up to a girls’ school, brought out the top class and shot them simply because the Polish intelligentsia was to be wiped out. Just imagine, he asked his colleagues, if the Allies had arrived in Hechingen, the small town where many of them had been evacuated during the last years of the war, driven to a girls’ school and shot all the girls!<sup>14</sup> Despite the apparently nationalistic and racist tone immediately after the war, these scientists probably would have been appalled at the scale and depth of the depravity demonstrated by some of their countrymen over the course of the “Euthanasia” program, the war in the east, and the Holocaust.</p><p>As Ryan Dahn has perceptively noted: “[…] instead of revealing what Heisenberg and company knew about atomic bombs, when they knew it, and what their intentions were in building them (or not), what they [the transcripts] actually show is how history is processed by humans in real time.”<sup>15</sup> The scientists’ initial reaction to the news of Hiroshima, at a point in time when they had not heard many details about the Allied atomic bomb, was disbelief. The BBC news reports of Hiroshima were not specific and contained very little scientific information. Indeed, much of the confusion found in the Farm Hall transcripts arguably has more to do with the Germans’ lack of information and desperate desire to believe that they had not been completely outdone, than with any lack of scientific or technical understanding on their part. However, as more details gradually trickled in, they were eventually forced to admit that the American-led Manhattan Project had far outstripped their now apparently modest efforts.</p><p>The next step these scientists took in dealing with the news was to discuss and debate whether they could have built atomic bombs. Heisenberg argued that the turning point was the spring of 1942, when they were able to convince political authorities that it could be done, with the result that for the first time large funds were made available for their research. However, he added they also would not have had the moral courage to recommend to the government in the spring of 1942 that they should devote 120,000 men to this task.<sup>16</sup> Weizsäcker argued that, even if they had gotten all the support they wanted, it was still not clear that they could have gotten as far as the Americans and British: Even if the Germans had put the same energy into it as the Americans and had wanted it as much as they did, the Americans would have destroyed the German factories. Indeed, Weizsäcker tried to shift the discussion by arguing that what was important was not how far the Germans had gotten, rather the fact that they had been convinced that it could not be completed during the war.</p><p>The final stage in the collective construction of a legend for the “German atomic bomb” came when the scientists asked themselves whether or not they had wanted to do it. Early on Wirtz simply stated that he was glad that they did not have it. Weizsäcker took the lead in constructing a consensus, arguing that, instead of making excuses for why they had failed, they should admit that they had not wanted to succeed.<sup>17</sup> Hahn replied that he did not believe that, but was thankful that they had not succeeded. Heisenberg admitted that he had been happy to work on a nuclear reactor instead of a bomb.<sup>18</sup> On the other hand, Bagge subsequently told Kurt Diebner that it was absurd for Weizsäcker to claim that they had not wanted to succeed. While that might have been true for him, it was not for everyone.<sup>19</sup></p><p>Let us give the last word to Max von Laue, the only one of the Farm Hall scientists who had not worked on uranium during the war. The letter he wrote to his son in the United States on the day of Hiroshima said: “This first practical application of uranium fission has placed tremendous power in the hands of men. Let God grant that it never falls into anyone but <i>clean</i> hands!”<sup>20</sup> If any of the other scientists had said this, then we would find it ironic.</p>","PeriodicalId":55388,"journal":{"name":"Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6000,"publicationDate":"2023-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/bewi.202300009","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bewi.202300009","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"HISTORY & PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0

Abstract

Review of Dieter Hoffmann (ed.), Operation Epsilon: Die Farm-Hall-Protokolle erstmals vollständig, ergänzt um zeitgenössische Briefe und weitere Dokumente der 1945 in England internierten deutschen Atomforscher, 2nd edn. (Diepholz: GNT-Verlag, 2023), 588 pages, 57 figures, notes, bibliography, index, ISBN 978-3-86225-111-7, 44,80 €.

At the end of the Second World War Allied forces arrested ten German scientists and interned them in a British country house named Farm Hall. Most of these scientists had been connected to the “uranium project,” research into the technical and military applications of nuclear fission. The scientists’ conversations were overheard via hidden microphones, selectively transcribed, translated, and distributed to a few people as secret reports. The original recordings were not saved, and with a few exceptions, the original German conversations were not included.

The Farm Hall transcripts have a long history. They were first used in print by the physicist Samuel Goudsmit in his popular 1947 book Alsos. Goudsmit, who had been part of the Alsos Mission scientific-intelligence gathering mission sent to Europe to find and neutralize any German atomic bomb, argued that the Nazis had ruined German science, with the wartime German uranium project as his main example. Although Goudsmit clearly read and used the transcripts, he did not explicitly reveal their existence.1 This became clear in 1962 when the former general in charge of the American Manhattan Project, Leslie Groves, quoted from the transcripts in his memoirs.2 Indeed Groves appears to have gone out of his way to select some of the most embarrassing and unflattering quotations in order to discredit the German scientists.

When in 1989/1990 this author published his book on the uranium project, a revised version of his dissertation,3 it appeared that the Farm Hall transcripts might never appear. In fact, they were released shortly thereafter in 1992. They quickly appeared in two English-language editions: a straight-forward publication of the transcripts by the British physicist Charles Frank and an extensively annotated version by the American physicist Jeremy Bernstein. Both editions have problems.

In his introduction, Frank argued that “Heisenberg's estimate [at Farm Hall] of the critical mass for a nuclear explosion in 235U,” which was a “gross overestimate,” was “of crucial importance for determining German nuclear energy policy during the war.” Here Frank subtly misquotes Heisenberg (or at least the transcripts) by writing that “he never worked it out properly,”4 when in fact according to the Farm Hall transcripts Heisenberg said: “[…] quite honestly I have never worked it out as I never believed that one could get pure ‘235.’”5 Like many other readers of these transcripts, Frank also did not take into account both how shocked and skeptical the scientists initially were.

In contrast to the first publication of the Farm Hall transcripts, Jeremy Bernstein's edition includes extensive commentary, especially with regard to physics. Bernstein approached this work as a physicist doing history rather than a historian of physics. Instead of reconstructing the historical context of Heisenberg's statements and calculations about atomic bombs, for example what Heisenberg had done and said during the war, how far the uranium research had proceeded, what information had been available to him, or what he had been tasked to do, Bernstein simply asked whether the physics was correct, using the high standards of either what the Manhattan Project scientists finally achieved, or current physical knowledge, in order to conclude that the “Germans had no comprehensive understanding of bomb physics.”6 Bernstein thereby squandered much of the historical significance of the Farm Hall transcripts. Indeed, the most important evidence for what happened during the war comes from the war, not the subsequent postwar period. Wartime sources make clear that Heisenberg's understanding of the critical mass of an atomic bomb, whatever that was, was in fact not crucial for the development of the uranium project.7

The Farm Hall transcripts have also inspired theater. Michael Frayn's award-winning and influential play Copenhagen includes material gleaned from Farm Hall.8 The historian of science David Cassidy has both published a play based on Farm Hall and commented on the advantages and disadvantages of this genre for bringing historical events to the general public.9

Because with few exceptions the original German dialogue has been lost, the German edition of the Farm Hall transcripts is mostly composed of retranslations of the recorded conversations. Editing and publishing the first edition of this book in 1993 was a controversial, if not courageous thing for an East German scholar to do during the turbulent years immediately following the opening of the Berlin wall and fall of communism. Hoffmann's introduction provides a very good survey of the German wartime work, showing that they understood the essential fundamentals of atomic bombs. Hoffmann's perceptive analysis of the conversations in Farm Hall reveals that, step by step, the scientists moved towards a consensus that would help them navigate the “politics of the past” (Vergangenheitspolitik) in the postwar era, encapsulated by Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker's argument that they had not wanted to build atomic bombs. Both editions of Operation Epsilon include an extensive 1992 interview with Weizsäcker, which is important and especially interesting because it documents one of the first times that Weizsäcker tried to engage with the work of scholars (including this reviewer) who had called his earlier accounts of the German uranium work into question. The new revised second edition includes a few more passages from Farm Hall as well as over 100 pages of additional valuable historical sources: the diaries of Erich Bagge and Otto Hahn, correspondence from Walther Gerlach, Werner Heisenberg, Max von Laue, and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, and two reports regarding Lise Meitner and the wartime German nuclear research composed by Hahn.

If the transcripts ironically do not reveal much about the uranium research during the war, what do they tell us? The British wardens at Farm Hall detected the lingering effect of National Socialist ideology on the scientists. When the detainees were lent a copy of Life magazine containing articles on the atom bomb and a number of photographs of the scientists who had worked on it, Weizsäcker remarked that naturally most were Germans. For the British commander, Weizsäcker's claim, which was in fact false, demonstrated that the scientists still believed in the master race. Indeed with the possible exception of Max von Laue, he thought that applied to every one of the guests.10 As Jeremy Bernstein has pointed out, ironically many of the scientists portrayed were in fact Jewish.11 Even Heisenberg made a remarkable comparison between the Allied officials who had interned the Germans and were deciding their fate and some of the most infamous men in the Third Reich. While some officials were extremely friendly towards the German scientists, Heisenberg compared others, who supposedly wanted to keep the Germans locked up in Farm Hall, to Reinhard Heydrich and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the two men who had served as second-in-command of the SS.12

In fact, the scientists interned at Farm Hall expressed very different opinions about the worst excesses of National Socialism. Erich Bagge argued that if the Germans had put people in concentration camps during the war and if Hitler had ordered a few atrocities in concentration camps during the last few years of the conflict, then these excesses had occurred under the stress of war.13 In contrast, Karl Wirtz stated flatly that he and his countrymen had done unprecedented things. In Poland the SS had driven up to a girls’ school, brought out the top class and shot them simply because the Polish intelligentsia was to be wiped out. Just imagine, he asked his colleagues, if the Allies had arrived in Hechingen, the small town where many of them had been evacuated during the last years of the war, driven to a girls’ school and shot all the girls!14 Despite the apparently nationalistic and racist tone immediately after the war, these scientists probably would have been appalled at the scale and depth of the depravity demonstrated by some of their countrymen over the course of the “Euthanasia” program, the war in the east, and the Holocaust.

As Ryan Dahn has perceptively noted: “[…] instead of revealing what Heisenberg and company knew about atomic bombs, when they knew it, and what their intentions were in building them (or not), what they [the transcripts] actually show is how history is processed by humans in real time.”15 The scientists’ initial reaction to the news of Hiroshima, at a point in time when they had not heard many details about the Allied atomic bomb, was disbelief. The BBC news reports of Hiroshima were not specific and contained very little scientific information. Indeed, much of the confusion found in the Farm Hall transcripts arguably has more to do with the Germans’ lack of information and desperate desire to believe that they had not been completely outdone, than with any lack of scientific or technical understanding on their part. However, as more details gradually trickled in, they were eventually forced to admit that the American-led Manhattan Project had far outstripped their now apparently modest efforts.

The next step these scientists took in dealing with the news was to discuss and debate whether they could have built atomic bombs. Heisenberg argued that the turning point was the spring of 1942, when they were able to convince political authorities that it could be done, with the result that for the first time large funds were made available for their research. However, he added they also would not have had the moral courage to recommend to the government in the spring of 1942 that they should devote 120,000 men to this task.16 Weizsäcker argued that, even if they had gotten all the support they wanted, it was still not clear that they could have gotten as far as the Americans and British: Even if the Germans had put the same energy into it as the Americans and had wanted it as much as they did, the Americans would have destroyed the German factories. Indeed, Weizsäcker tried to shift the discussion by arguing that what was important was not how far the Germans had gotten, rather the fact that they had been convinced that it could not be completed during the war.

The final stage in the collective construction of a legend for the “German atomic bomb” came when the scientists asked themselves whether or not they had wanted to do it. Early on Wirtz simply stated that he was glad that they did not have it. Weizsäcker took the lead in constructing a consensus, arguing that, instead of making excuses for why they had failed, they should admit that they had not wanted to succeed.17 Hahn replied that he did not believe that, but was thankful that they had not succeeded. Heisenberg admitted that he had been happy to work on a nuclear reactor instead of a bomb.18 On the other hand, Bagge subsequently told Kurt Diebner that it was absurd for Weizsäcker to claim that they had not wanted to succeed. While that might have been true for him, it was not for everyone.19

Let us give the last word to Max von Laue, the only one of the Farm Hall scientists who had not worked on uranium during the war. The letter he wrote to his son in the United States on the day of Hiroshima said: “This first practical application of uranium fission has placed tremendous power in the hands of men. Let God grant that it never falls into anyone but clean hands!”20 If any of the other scientists had said this, then we would find it ironic.

伊普西龙行动
Berichte zur WissenschaftsgeschichteEarly View Book Review Operation Epsilon Mark Walker,通讯作者Mark Walker [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0002-0507-1954纽约斯克内克塔迪联合学院历史系搜索本作者的更多论文[email protected] orcid.org/0000-0002-0507-1954纽约斯克内克塔迪联合学院历史系搜索本作者的更多论文首次发表:2023年10月30日https://doi.org/10.1002/bewi.202300009Read全文taboutpdf ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare给予accessShare全文accessShare全文accessShare请查看我们的使用条款和条件,并勾选下面的复选框共享文章的全文版本。我已经阅读并接受了Wiley在线图书馆使用共享链接的条款和条件,请使用下面的链接与您的朋友和同事分享本文的全文版本。学习更多的知识。1伯恩斯坦,杰里米(编),希特勒的铀俱乐部:农场大厅的秘密录音(伍德伯里:美国物理研究所出版社,1996年)。2 David C. cassidy,“农场大厅的戏剧:一个历史学家对戏剧写作的冒险”,Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 45, no。1-2(2022): 245-260。[3]张建军,刘建军,《二战德国原子计划:一个戏剧性的历史》(中国科学版,2017)。4Dahn, Ryan,“农场大厅记录:不存在的确凿证据”,Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 45, no。1-2(2022): 202-218。5Frank, Charles(编),《Epsilon操作:农场大厅记录》(Bristol: Institute of Physics, 1993)。6 Michael frayn,哥本哈根(纽约:Anchor, 1998)。[7]塞缪尔·古德史密斯(纽约:亨利·舒曼出版社,1947)。8莱斯利·格罗夫斯,《现在可以讲述:曼哈顿计划的故事》(纽约:哈珀兄弟出版社,1962年)。9Hoffmann, Dieter(编),操作Epsilon: Die农场-大厅- protokolle erstmals vollständig, ergänzt um zeitgenössische简介和weitere文件1945年在英国德国原子能研究所,第2版。(Diepholz: GNT-Verlag, 2023)。10马克·沃克:《维尔纳·海森堡知道原子弹是如何工作的吗?》Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 45, no。1-2(2022): 219-244。11马克·沃克,《铀机器:德国原子弹的神话与工作原理》(柏林:西德勒出版社,1990)。12马克·沃克,《德国国家社会主义和对核能的追求,1939-1949》(剑桥:剑桥大学出版社,1989)。在问题包含之前的早期视图在线版本的记录参考信息 评论 Dieter Hoffmann(编辑),《Operation Epsilon: Die Farm-Hall-Protokolle erstmals vollständig,ergänzt um zeitgenössische Briefe und weitere Dokumente der 1945 in England internierten deutschen Atomforscher》,第 2 版。(Diepholz: GNT-Verlag, 2023),588 页,57 个数字,注释,参考书目,索引,ISBN 978-3-86225-111-7,44,80 欧元。第二次世界大战结束时,盟军逮捕了十名德国科学家,并将他们关押在英国一座名为 Farm Hall 的乡间别墅中。这些科学家大多与 "铀项目 "有关,该项目研究核裂变的技术和军事应用。科学家们的谈话被隐蔽的麦克风窃听到,经过选择性地转录、翻译,并作为秘密报告分发给少数人。原始录音没有保存下来,除个别情况外,德文谈话原文也没有包括在内。农场大厅的录音记录由来已久,物理学家塞缪尔-古兹米特(Samuel Goudsmit)在其 1947 年出版的畅销书《阿尔索斯》(Alsos)中首次使用了这些记录。戈德斯密特曾是被派往欧洲寻找德国原子弹并使其失效的 "阿尔索斯使命 "科学情报搜集团的成员,他以战时德国的铀项目为例,认为纳粹毁掉了德国的科学。1 1962 年,前美国曼哈顿项目总负责人莱斯利-格罗夫斯在其回忆录中引用了这些记录,这一点才变得清晰起来。事实上,格罗夫斯似乎不遗余力地选择了一些最令人难堪、最不光彩的引文,以诋毁德国科学家。1989/1990 年,当本文作者出版其关于铀项目的著作(其论文的修订版)时,3 农场大厅的记录稿似乎可能永远不会出现。事实上,这些文字记录很快就在 1992 年面世了。它们很快以两个英文版本出现:一个是英国物理学家查尔斯-弗兰克(Charles Frank)直接出版的记录稿,另一个是美国物理学家杰里米-伯恩斯坦(Jeremy Bernstein)大量注释的版本。在导言中,弗兰克认为 "海森堡(在农场大厅)对 235U 核爆炸临界质量的估计 "是 "严重高估","对确定战争期间德国的核能政策至关重要"。弗兰克在这里巧妙地错误引用了海森堡的话(至少是文字记录),写道 "他从未正确地计算过",4 而事实上,根据农场大厅的文字记录,海森堡是这样说的"[......]老实说,我从未研究过它,因为我从不相信人们可以得到纯粹的'235'。"5 与许多其他阅读这些记录稿的读者一样,弗兰克也没有考虑到科学家们最初是多么震惊和怀疑。伯恩斯坦是以物理学家而非物理学史家的身份来研究这部著作的。伯恩斯坦没有重建海森堡关于原子弹的声明和计算的历史背景,例如海森堡在战争期间做了什么,说了什么,铀研究进行到什么程度,他获得了哪些信息,或者他的任务是什么,而是简单地询问物理学是否正确,使用曼哈顿项目科学家最终取得的成果或当前物理知识的高标准,以得出 "德国人对原子弹物理学没有全面了解 "的结论。"6 伯恩斯坦因此浪费了农场大厅记录的大部分历史意义。事实上,战争期间发生的事情最重要的证据来自战争期间,而不是随后的战后时期。战时资料清楚地表明,海森堡对原子弹临界质量的理解--无论那是什么--实际上对铀项目的发展并不重要。迈克尔-弗拉恩(Michael Frayn)的戏剧《哥本哈根》(Copenhagen)屡获殊荣,影响深远,其中的素材就来自《农场大厅》。8 科学史学者戴维-卡西迪(David Cassidy)出版了一部根据《农场大厅》改编的戏剧,并评论了这种体裁将历史事件呈现给大众的利弊。1993 年编辑出版本书第一版,对于一位东德学者来说,在柏林墙开放和共产主义垮台后的动荡岁月里,这样做即使不是勇气可嘉,也是颇具争议的。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
求助全文
约1分钟内获得全文 求助全文
来源期刊
Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte
Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 社会科学-科学史与科学哲学
CiteScore
0.80
自引率
16.70%
发文量
43
审稿时长
>12 weeks
期刊介绍: Die Geschichte der Wissenschaften ist in erster Linie eine Geschichte der Ideen und Entdeckungen, oft genug aber auch der Moden, Irrtümer und Missverständnisse. Sie hängt eng mit der Entwicklung kultureller und zivilisatorischer Leistungen zusammen und bleibt von der politischen Geschichte keineswegs unberührt.
×
引用
GB/T 7714-2015
复制
MLA
复制
APA
复制
导出至
BibTeX EndNote RefMan NoteFirst NoteExpress
×
提示
您的信息不完整,为了账户安全,请先补充。
现在去补充
×
提示
您因"违规操作"
具体请查看互助需知
我知道了
×
提示
确定
请完成安全验证×
copy
已复制链接
快去分享给好友吧!
我知道了
右上角分享
点击右上角分享
0
联系我们:info@booksci.cn Book学术提供免费学术资源搜索服务,方便国内外学者检索中英文文献。致力于提供最便捷和优质的服务体验。 Copyright © 2023 布克学术 All rights reserved.
京ICP备2023020795号-1
ghs 京公网安备 11010802042870号
Book学术文献互助
Book学术文献互助群
群 号:481959085
Book学术官方微信