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    Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics under Hitler
    Unavailable
    Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics under Hitler
    Unavailable
    Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics under Hitler
    Ebook425 pages9 hours

    Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics under Hitler

    By Philip Ball

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    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    After World War II, most scientists in Germany maintained that they had been apolitical or actively resisted the Nazi regime, but the true story is much more complicated. In Serving the Reich, Philip Ball takes a fresh look at that controversial history, contrasting the career of Peter Debye, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin, with those of two other leading physicists in Germany during the Third Reich: Max Planck, the elder statesman of physics after whom Germany’s premier scientific society is now named, and Werner Heisenberg, who succeeded Debye as director of the institute when it became focused on the development of nuclear power and weapons.        
     
    Mixing history, science, and biography, Ball’s gripping exploration of the lives of scientists under Nazism offers a powerful portrait of moral choice and personal responsibility, as scientists navigated “the grey zone between complicity and resistance.” Ball’s account of the different choices these three men and their colleagues made shows how there can be no clear-cut answers or judgement of their conduct. Yet, despite these ambiguities, Ball makes it undeniable that the German scientific establishment as a whole mounted no serious resistance to the Nazis, and in many ways acted as a willing instrument of the state.
     
    Serving the Reich considers what this problematic history can tell us about the relationship of science and politics today. Ultimately, Ball argues, a determination to present science as an abstract inquiry into nature that is “above politics” can leave science and scientists dangerously compromised and vulnerable to political manipulation.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateOct 20, 2014
    ISBN9780226204604
    Unavailable
    Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics under Hitler
    Author

    Philip Ball

    Philip Ball is a freelance writer and broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including H2O: A Biography of Water, Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, The Music Instinct, and Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also a presenter of Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He is the author of The Modern Myths. He lives in London.

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    • 4/5
      Serving the ReichAt the end of the Second World War the allies were chasing down scientists as quickly as possible in a game of cat and mouse not just across Germany but especially around Berlin. The biggest race was that between the USA and Russia and they were looking for physicists specifically so they could put them to use for their own specific purposes using developments that had come about under Nazi Germany. We just have to look at the nuclear physicist and rocket specialist that in some cases were literally smuggled out of Germany to various research facilities the allies had. This book is an interesting explanation as to the development of the importance of science and specifically physics under Nazi patronage and how those scientists used this to their advantage while ignoring the consequences of their actions.This area of historical research has been written about well and often by many others the difference with this book by Phillip Ball is that it is far more comprehensive and well written making it a pleasure to read. What I like about Ball’s research and writing is that he does his best to be even handed, while not afraid to point the finger when necessary. While Ball discuss’ the physics community at large he also focuses especially on three Noble laureates in Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg and the Dutchman Peter Debye. A lot of the new material in this book comes from the archives of Peter Debye who moved to America in 1940 which makes fascinating reading. I can highly recommend this book as an important addition to the debate on the Sciences during the Nazi Period.