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Having just finished the epic Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, my mind goes to a different place —- Heisenberg was at the core of the German bomb pr
by superposeur 4y ago
Having just finished the epic Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, my mind goes to a different place —- Heisenberg was at the core of the German bomb project. Speculatively, I wonder how things might have gone a different way had he been required to be a brilliant experimentalist too. Success versus failure hinged on nitty-gritty experimental details, not on sweeping theoretical insight.
Probably not, but then again — Germany is where fission was discovered and an also a powerhouse of chemical engineering. Not all of German science fled the nazis.
- vibrolax 4y agoI don't know. Having the theoretical and experimental physics talent was a necessary condition for producing the atomic bomb, but was not sufficient. What was lacking was a government willing and able to commit to a crash program building the novel industrial base for isotope separation, radiochemical separation, and all the other things detailed in Rhodes' (and others books).
- superposeur 4y agoAgreed that this is low probability. But it did strike me that the Nazi brass were most interested in such a crash program, at one point declaring that it should be given top priority. What dissuaded them were the apparent failures of early efforts and lack of confidence of the scientists themselves — the scientists got hung up on use of heavy water as a neutron moderator, among other suboptimal practical decisions.
- Nomentatus 4y agoIt's true that the NAZI govt thought the war would be won or lost in a couple of years, so longer programs weren't much valued. But they invested in rockets which didn't come into play quickly. The German physicists told the govt the bomb was far off; but there's every reason to think the scientists knew better and deliberately fudged their calculations.
- AaronM 4y agoYou might also like Now it Can Be Told: the Story of the Manhattan Project by Leslie R. Groves I thought it did a good job at talking about how the Army made everything happen.
- SamReidHughes 4y agoYep, both are fantastic.
- superposeur 4y agoThanks for this suggestion. I couldn’t believe the quality of the Rhodes book.