Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker

Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker
Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, 1993
Born	June 28, 1912 Kiel, Schleswig-Holstein
Died	April 28, 2007(2007-04-28) (aged 94) Starnberg, Bavaria
Citizenship	Germany
Nationality	German
Fields	Physics
Doctoral advisor	Friedrich Hund
Notable awards	Templeton Prize

Carl Friedrich Freiherr von Weizsäcker (June 28, 1912 – April 28, 2007) was a German physicist and philosopher. He was the longest-living member of the research team which performed nuclear research in Germany during the Second World War, under Werner Heisenberg's leadership. There is ongoing debate as to whether he, and the other members of the team, actually willingly pursued the development of a nuclear bomb for Germany during this time.

Weizsäcker was son of the diplomat Ernst von Weizsäcker, elder brother of the former German President Richard von Weizsäcker, father of the physicist and environmental researcher Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker, and brother-in-law of the former General Secretary of the World Council of Churches Konrad Raiser.

Born in Kiel, Schleswig-Holstein, Weizsäcker was raised in Stuttgart, Basel, and Copenhagen. From 1929 to 1933, Weizsäcker studied physics, mathematics and astronomy in Berlin, Göttingen and Leipzig supervised by and in cooperation with Heisenberg and Niels Bohr, among others. The supervisor of his doctoral thesis was Friedrich Hund.

His special interests as a young researcher were the nuclear processes in stars, and the binding energy of atomic nuclei. Together with Hans Bethe he found a mechanism or pathway for the cyclic process of fusion in stars (Bethe–Weizsäcker process, published 1937-1939). This discovery should not be confused with his development of the Bethe–Weizsäcker formula, or Semi-empirical mass formula (SEMF), a theoretical formula for the curve of nuclear binding energy and certain other nuclear properties.

Weizsäcker also conducted significant theoretical work on planetary formation in the early Solar System.

Background

He was the grandson of Karl Hugo von Weizsäcker, the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Württemberg. His grandfather was ennobled in 1897, and raised to the hereditary nobility with the title of Baron (Freiherr) in 1916. As such Carl Friedrich Weizsäcker became Baron Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker at the age of four. Since 1919, noble titles have legally been considered parts of the family name.

Work on planetary formation

Weizsäcker developed a theory on the formation of the Solar System, in 1938, based on considerations regarding the unequal share of lighter and heavier elements in the Sun and the Solar System's terrestrial planets. His views were later generally acknowledged and refined by a large number of other physicists and astronomers. According to the theory, the Sun and its planets evolved from a gas cloud made up by 99% of hydrogen and helium and 1% of heavier elements. 10% of the cloud remaining around the Sun as an extensive atmosphere, during an initial phase, the 1% of heavier elements within these 10% of the total mass of the cloud would tally with the fraction of roughly 1‰ that the planets contribute to the mass of the Solar System. The theory helped to explain the regularity in the increase of the diameters of the orbits of the planets of the Solar System from inward to outward, and led to the conclusion that many stars out in universe similar to the Sun would have to be expected to possess planetary systems similar to our own.

Work on atomic weapons

As a theoretical physicist, Weizsäcker (and by his own estimate, 200 other physicists) had recognized immediately after nuclear fission had become known (cf. Otto Hahn) in 1938 that nuclear weapons could potentially be built. He discussed the upsetting implications in February 1938 with philosopher friend Georg Picht. During World War II, Weizsäcker joined the German nuclear energy project, participating in efforts to construct an atomic bomb. As early as August 1939, Albert Einstein had warned U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt about this research and that: "... the son of the German Under-Secretary of State, von Weizsäcker, is attached to the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut in Berlin where some of the American work on uranium is now being repeated."

As a protégé of Werner Heisenberg, Weizsäcker was present at a crucial meeting at the Army Ordnance headquarters in Berlin on 17 September 1939, at which the German atomic weapons program was launched. Early during the war -possibly until 1942-, he had been hoping for political influence growing out of participation in a successful nuclear weapons project. In July 1940 he was co-author of a report to the Army on the possibility of "energy production" from refined uranium. The report also predicted the possibility of using plutonium for the same purpose including the production of a new type of explosives. During summer 1942 Weizsäcker filed a patent on a transportable "process to generate energy and neutrons by an explosion ... e.g., a bomb". The patent application was found in the 1990s in Moscow.

Historians have been divided as to whether Heisenberg and his team were sincerely trying to construct a nuclear weapon, or whether their failure reflected a desire not to succeed because they did not want the Nazi regime to have such a weapon. This latter view, largely based on postwar interviews with Heisenberg and Weizsäcker, was put forward by Robert Jungk in his 1957 book Brighter Than a Thousand Suns. In a 1957 interview with the German weekly Der Spiegel, Weizsäcker frankly admitted to the scientific ambitions of those years "We wanted to know if chain reactions were possible. No matter what we would end up doing with our knowledge – we wanted to know." Only by "divine grace", Weizsäcker said, were they spared the temptation to build the bomb - grace, as the German war economy was unable to mobilize the necessary resources.

Original sources about this question were not revealed until 1993, when transcripts of secretly recorded conversations among ten top German physicists, including Heisenberg and Weizsäcker, detained under Operation Epsilon at Farm Hall, near Cambridge in late 1945, were published. In the conversation after the group of detainees had listened to the BBC radio news on dropping of the atomic bomb on 6 August 1945, Weizsäcker said: "I believe the reason we didn't do it was because all the physicists didn't want to do it, on principle. If we had wanted Germany to win the war we would have succeeded!" But the "Farm Hall Transcripts" also revealed that Weizsäcker had taken the lead in arguing for an agreement among the scientists that they would claim that they had never wanted to develop a German nuclear weapon. This story was at least untrue to the extent that the detainees also included scientists actively engaged in eager attempts to build a nuclear bomb, namely Kurt Diebner and Walter Gerlach. Max von Laue later called this agreement "die Lesart" (the Version). Although the memorandum which the scientists drew up was drafted by Heisenberg, von Laue wrote: "The leader in all these discussions was Weizsäcker. I did not hear any mention of any ethical point of view." It was this version of events which was given to Jungk as the basis of his book.

Weizsäcker stated himself that Heisenberg, Karl Wirtz and he had a private agreement to study nuclear fission to the fullest possible in order to "decide" themselves how to proceed with its technical application. "There was no conspiracy, not even in our small three-men-circle, with certainty not to make the bomb. Just as little, there was no passion to make the bomb..." In a recent report based on additional documents from Russian archives, historian Mark Walker concludes that "in comparison with Diebner [and] Gerlach ... Heisenberg and finally Weizsäcker did obviously not use all power they commanded to provide the National Socialists with nuclear weapons".

Ivan Supek (one of Heisenberg's students and friends) claimed that Weizsäcker was the main figure of the famous and controversial Heisenberg–Bohr meeting in Copenhagen in September 1941. Allegedly, he tried to persuade Bohr to mediate for peace between Germany and Great Britain. According to Weizsäcker's own account, he had persuaded Heisenberg to meet Bohr in order to broker an accord of the international nuclear physicist "community" not to build the bomb.

Weizsäcker worked later during the war as a professor in Strasbourg. The American capture of his laboratory and papers there in December 1944 revealed to the Western Allies that the Germans had not come close to developing a nuclear weapon.

Postwar career

Von Weizsäcker in 1983

Weizsäcker was allowed to return to Germany in 1946 and became director of a department for theoretical physics in the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Göttingen. From 1957 to 1969, Weizsäcker was professor of philosophy at the University of Hamburg. In 1957 he won the Max Planck medal. In 1970 he formulated a "Weltinnenpolitik" (world internal policy). From 1970 to 1980, he was head of the Max Planck Institute for the Research of Living Conditions in the Modern World in Starnberg. He researched and published on the danger of nuclear war, what he saw as the conflict between the First World and the Third World, and the consequences of environmental degradation. In the 1970s he founded, together with the Indian philosopher Pandit Gopi Krishna, a research foundation "for western sciences and eastern wisdom". After his retirement in 1980 he became a Christian pacifist, and intensified his work on the conceptual definition of quantum physics, particularly on the Copenhagen interpretation.

His experiences in the Nazi era, and with his own behavior in this time, gave Weizsäcker an interest in questions on ethics and responsibility. He was one of the Göttinger 18—18 prominent German physicists—who protested in 1957 against the idea that the Bundeswehr should be armed with tactical nuclear weapons. He further suggested that West Germany should declare its definitive abdication of all kinds of nuclear weapons.

Weizsäcker died in Söcking near Starnberg. On the question on whether he accepted his share of responsibility for the German scientific community's efforts to build a nuclear weapon for Nazi Germany, opinions are split.

Theory of ur-alternatives

Weizsäcker developed the theory of ur-alternatives (archetypal objects), publicized in his book Einheit der Natur (1971) and further developed through the 1990s, which axiomatically construct quantum physics from the distinction between empirically observable, binary alternatives. Weizsäcker used his theory, a form of digital physics, to derive the 3-dimensionality of space and to estimate the entropy of a proton falling into a black hole.

Awards and honours

In 1963, Weizsäcker was awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (peace award of the German booksellers). In 1989, he won the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. He also received the Pour le Mérite.

The Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker Gymnasium named after him, in the town of Barmstedt, Schleswig-Holstein.

Notes

Freiherr was a title, translated as Baron, not a first or middle name. From 1919 Freiherr and its feminine equivalents are no longer titles but part of the surname, following the given name(s) and are not translated.

Works

• Zum Weltbild der Physik, Leipzig 1946 (ISBN 3-7776-1209-X), 2002, 14th edition, renewed and with introduction by Holger Lyre de:Holger Lyre
  • translation into English by Marjorie Grene The World View of Physics, London, 1952
  • translation into French Le Monde vu par la Physique, Paris 1956
• Die Geschichte der Natur, Göttingen 1948 (ISBN 3-7776-1398-3)
• Die Einheit der Natur, Munich 1971 (ISBN 3-423-33083-X)
  • translation The Unity of Nature, New York, 1980 (ISBN 0-374-28100-9)
• Wege in der Gefahr, Munich 1976
  • translation The Politics of Peril, New York 1978
• Der Garten des Menschlichen, Munich 1977 (ISBN 3-446-12423-3)
  • translation The Ambivalence of progress, essays on historical anthropology, New York 1988 (ISBN 0-913729-92-2)
• The Biological Basis of Religion and Genius, Gopi Krishna, New York, intro. by Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, which is half the book, 1971, 1972 (ISBN 0-06-064788-4)
• Aufbau der Physik, Munich 1985 (ISBN 3-446-14142-1)
  • translation The Structure of Physics, Heidelberg 2006 (ISBN 1-4020-5234-0; ISBN 978-1-4020-5234-7)
• Der Mensch in seiner Geschichte, Munich 1991 (ISBN 3-446-16361-1)
• Zeit und Wissen, Munich 1992 (ISBN 3-446-16367-0)
• Große Physiker, Munich 1999 (ISBN 3-446-18772-3)

See also

• CNO cycle
• Liquid drop model
• Pandit Gopi Krishna
• Kundalini

External links

• Annotated bibliography for Carl Weizsacker from the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues
• "Ich wollte erkennen, ob Atombomben möglich sind" – An interview with Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. uni-hamburg.de