Heisenberg’s Choice

Walter White started out intelligent, innocent, and weak…. took a long hard look at the cards he had been dealt and decided he would rather be intelligent, ruthless, and deadly.

Like the Heisenberg everyone knows from Breaking Bad, the German physicist he based his alias on -Werner Heisenberg – was also brilliant, and was also faced with some harsh realities. He was best known for the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which he published in 1927 – and for his Nobel Prize in Physics, which he won in 1932 “for the creation of quantum mechanics.” If he had retired young and become a folk singer he would still have gone down in history as one of the greatest physicists of all time.

But he wasn’t old enough to retire [born December 5, 1901 – Happy Birthday Heisenberg!] and instead he was Germany’s top nuclear physicist at a pivotal time in history when Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party came to power in 1933 – and started WWII right after some other German physicists proved that uranium atoms could be ripped apart by nuclear fission to release enough energy for bombs a million times more powerful than conventional explosives.

Werner Heisenberg was also a brilliant man tempted towards corruption. Imagine, as a scientist whose career had peaked in the early 1930s with a Nobel Prize – having a chance to invent the most powerful device ever created and win the race every major country on Earth was hoping to win. As a patriotic German citizen, imagine the glory that would come (think of the 2023 movie “Oppenheimer” – when are still celebrating his victory in this scientific battle 78 years later) from helping your nation return to supremacy by decisively winning World War Two. Such a future – being the great scientific hero that brought Germany to victory – would have brought Heisenberg fame, adoration, wealth, and the ability to work on whatever else he wanted to achieve with no political or financial restrictions after the war.

BUT….

That would mean that atomic bombs would be used on cities. Great cities like Moscow, London, and New York could be obliterated with his future invention.

And it would make Adolf Hitler and his Nazi henchmen the most powerful men in the world, bringing a new dark age for anyone who cared about intellectual freedom – or any other kind. A terrible future, for anyone with compassion. Was young Werner Heisenberg ready to accept responsibility for such a world? Could he accept responsibility for possibly millions of deaths his invention would bring? His fame and glory would come with a heavy price.

Of course, so would the decision not to make the world’s first atomic bombs. If Nazi Germany didn’t develop them first, the Allies would. Germany would be defeated, and perhaps Berlin and Hamburg would be among the first cities disintegrated and melted by atomic bombs. The communists Heisenberg had suffered under as a young man would undoubtedly take power in the ruins of Berlin under Soviet occupation… IF he chose not to give Hitler the bombs he wanted.

And IF I have made this sound half as interesting as events actually were, you might want to read more about what really happened in the atomic bomb programs of both Germany and the United States – and learn how and where the first atomic bombs were really made – because the truth is very different from the propaganda written by the victors that we were taught in school. Read:

Oppenheimer and Heisenberg

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David

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