Volume 25, Number 15 · October 12, 1978
The Scientist as Conformist
By David Joravsky
Soviet Science
by Zhores A. Medvedev
Norton, 262 pp., $10.95
Scientists under Hitler: Politics and the Physics Community in the Third Reich
by Alan D. Beyerchen
Yale University Press, 287 pp., $18.50
Proletarian Science? The Case of Lysenko
by Dominique Lecourt, translated by Ben Brewster
NLB, distributed by Schocken, 170 pp., $11.50
In August 1945 British military intelligence unwittingly performed a splendid experiment in the social psychology of natural scientists. They delivered the news of Hiroshima to interned German atomic scientists, and secretly recorded the conversation that resulted. Only fragments of the record have got past restrictions on 'classified' material, but they are enough to reveal the German scientists' mentality—their soul, if I may use an outmoded term. They were conscience-stricken; they had failed 'German science.' Casting about for reasons, they took note of the obvious disparity in size: the American A-bomb project had been enormously larger than their own. But that contrast only deepened the anguish of self-accusation. 'We would not have had the moral courage,' Werner Heisenberg, the originator of the Uncertainty Principle, exclaimed, 'to recommend to the government in the spring of 1942 that they should employ 120,000 people.'[1]
Review, 3994 words
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