I hated history in school. So did most of my contemporaries. So do most of today's children. (Can't envisage any change there unless history teaching goes for a complete overhaul.) Not surprisingly, it is the popular culture that has helped shape the perceptions of history for many of us. In fact, my interest in history was seriously piqued, for the first time, by Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (almost singularly responsible for ruining the summer internship work of a capricious masters student)!
Notwithstanding the academic debacle, medieval mysteries (and other such entertaining reads) have since been my standard go-to for historical perspectives. So, it was a pleasant surprise when yesterday's late night indulgence turned out to be based on a little piece of WWII physics history. The Catcher Was a Spy, a little known eponymous film (2018) based on a biographical book by Nicholas Dawidoff, narrates the story of Morris Berg (1902 – 1972).
Berg was a catcher in American Major League Baseball and later spied for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) of the USA. Primarily because of his academic background (Princeton, Columbia) and linguistic proficiency, he was tasked (1944) with interviewing European physicists and trying to convince them to move to the US. The primary goal of this was to prevent Germany from making The Bomb before Manhattan project succeeded in doing so.
Though a great number of German (mostly Jewish) scientists had fled from Germany once Nazis came to power, there was no doubt about the calibre and capability of Heisenberg and other remaining German scientists to produce an Atomic Bomb. However, whether they had the resources to do that and/or had the willingness to do so were questions the Allied Powers were most keen to know the answers of.
The climax of the film (as also of Berg's career, I suppose) took place in December, 1944 when Heisenberg traveled to Zurich to deliver a lecture on the invitation of the Swiss physicist Paul Scherrer. Berg's brief was to gauge the status of Germany's nuclear weapons program and to kill Heisenberg if they appeared to be close to success. Heisenberg lived, because Berg (correctly) assessed that the German efforts were not close enough!
Such an irony of fate! In the early 1930s, it was Heisenberg who was labeled as a White Jew (German Christians sympathetic to or in good terms with the Jewish people)! He was persecuted, his career suffered and things only improved through personal intervention from a family friend (Heisenberg's mother was a friend of Himmler's wife). Yet, because Heisenberg elected to stay back in Germany (many non-Jewish scientists left because of their differences with the Nazis) and because of his aforementioned family connections, he was never trusted by the scientists of the western bloc. At the end of the war, Heisenberg, von Weizsacker, Otto Hahn and other scientists working on German nuclear program were picked up by the British and interned at Farm Hill to investigate their wartime work. (https://sushan-konar-musings.blogspot.com/2021/06/28062021-of-different-era.html)
Almost exactly twenty years ago, I had an opportunity to visit the University of Leipzig where Heisenberg was a professor of theoretical physics (since 1927). He was awarded the Nobel prize (1932) while at Leipzig, and also met (1937) his future wife Elisabeth Schumacher at a musical evening there. Elisabeth was the sister of Friedrich Schumacher (1911 – 1977), the famous statistician and economist and author of Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered (1973) - a must-read for our generation!
This book made economics in general, and Schumacher's ideas in particular, accessible to a wide audience. Schumacher argued that our technological progress must take into account the fact that the natural resources (like fossil fuel, coal) are finite. This coincided with the emergence of environmental concerns (which has now taken centre-stage of world policy-making, as is evident from the ongoing COP26 being held in Glasgow).
Schumacher had a deep connection with many Asian countries and had also served as a consultant to the Planning Commission of India for a while. However, a long time has passed since then. As Sanjeev Sanyal, our current Principal Economic Advisor says, the economics of today is adopting the dynamical world-view appropriate of a complex system (instead of the deterministic world-view of Newtonian physics). Indeed! Giorgio Parisi, theoretical physicist who pioneered the study of complex systems, is one of this year's physics laureate! (https://sushan-konar-musings.blogspot.com/2021/10/25102021-value-of-science.html)
The personal economics of many of our persuasion (academic scientists, that is) may not be something to write home about, but it suits a physicists ego very well to imagine that our discipline is still defining the rules of the game! 😎
[The morning program of a Calcutta-based TV channel reminded me that it's Usha Uthup's birthday today. For me, her unusual voice, her unusual story, has always epitomised the many fights women must fight to find their own space, on their own terms. Because, despite all the odds she has been able to define her own space. Here's one song that I loved listening to in my younger days, and is rather appropriate for all those WWII references. The import of the song remains true even today. Because, the threat of violence is never very far from human endeavours.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4k9K088qTII (a recent stage performance)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65adlW50S-w (original recording)]
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