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

Description

An incisive and revealing exploration of the fate of physics under the Nazis - and how scientific idealism led to accommodation with a totalitarian regime. Serving the Reich tells the story of physics under Hitler. While some scientists tried to create an Aryan physics that excluded any 'Jewish ideas', many others made compromises and concessions as they continued to work under the Nazi regime. Among them were world-renowned physicists Max Planck, Peter Debye and Werner Heisenberg. After the war most scientists in Germany maintained they had been apolitical or even resisted the regime- Debye claimed that he had gone to America in 1940 to escape Nazi interference in his research; Heisenberg and others argued that they had deliberately delayed production of the atomic bomb. In a gripping exploration of moral choices under a totalitarian regime, here are human dilemmas, failures to take responsibility and three lives caught between the idealistic goals of science and a tyrannical ideology.

Philip Ball writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and worked for many years as an editor for physical sciences at Nature. His books cover a wide range of scientific and cultural phenomena, and include Critical Mass- How One Thing Leads To Another (winner of the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books), The Music Instinct, Curiosity- How Science Became Interested in Everything, Serving The Reich- The Struggle for the Soul of Science Under Hitler and Invisible- The history of the Unseen from Plato to Particle Physics.

Ball's book shows what can happen to morality when cleverness and discovery are valued above all else -- Philip Maughan * New Statesman * Ball does an outstanding service by reminding us how powerful and sometimes confusing the pressures were... Packed with dramatic, moving and even comical moments -- Robert P Crease * Nature * A fascinating account of the moral dilemmas faced by German physicists working within Nazism. Impeccably researched -- Ian Thomson * Tablet * An engrossing and disturbing book -- Andrew Robinson * History Today * [A] fine book -- Christopher Coker * Times Literary Supplement *