Beyond Uncertainty by David C. Cassidy

Author:David C. Cassidy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Published: 2010-07-05T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 19

THE LONELY YEARS

HEISENBERG’S TWO MAJOR SUCCESSES IN 1936—HIS RESPONSE TO THE NAZI DOGMA of Aryan physics and his construction of a potentially revolutionary physics of high-energy cosmic would, in the end, be short-lived. By early 1937, the alternative cascade theory of cosmic-ray showers, based solely on the accepted physics of positrons and quantum electrodynamics, would account for nearly all of the data on cosmic-ray showers, leaving little need or expectation for any new physics. In addition, by that summer a new and even more vicious attack by the proponents of Aryan physics would make it impossible for Heisenberg to succeed Sommerfeld and nearly impossible for him to remain in Germany at all. Even Heisenberg’s native optimism seemed at times outmatched by the course of events. His optimism would receive a “quantum” boost, however, during the first half of 1937, when, in rapid succession, he would meet and marry his wife, the future mother of his seven children. But even with marriage and a growing family, Heisenberg would recall the period before the outbreak of World War II as one of “unending loneliness.”

Heisenberg’s frequent travels abroad in this period—to Denmark, England, the United States—revealed to him Germany’s marked isolation. As nearly every domestic challenge to Nazi policies failed, most Germans who found themselves in similar situations felt discouraged politically and without, wrote Heisenberg, “the slightest hope of a change from within.” While he and others insisted on riding out the storm to its end, the regime continued to engender distrust of all but one’s closest friends, vastly increasing the “isolation of the individual,” as Heisenberg called it. But it was an isolation to which Heisenberg’s personality made him particularly susceptible.1

Throughout his life, Heisenberg’s confidence in scientific matters contrasted sharply with his lack of assurance in personal affairs. This was manifest whenever circumstances separated him from his younger male companions, even as he approached middle age. His diffidence grew especially evident during the middle 1930s, as his fortieth birthday approached, and after his only known premarital romance—a relationship with Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker’s charming younger sister, Adelheid—was brought to an abrupt end by her parents. The failed romance is revealed in his letters to his mother, recently published by one of his daughters.2 Although Heisenberg is remembered in Leipzig as having dated a variety of eligible local socialites, little is known of Adelheid or of the reasons for their breakup. No doubt the family objected to the age difference between the professor, then 34, and the young woman, who was still in her teens and only recently graduated (1934) from a literary secondary school in Bern, Switzerland. Her father, Ernst von Weizsäcker, probably also preferred an aristocrat over an academic—even as impressive an academic as Heisenberg—as a suitor for his daughter.

During his semester break in March 1936, Heisenberg had joined Carl Friedrich and the Weizsäcker family for a mountain-climbing excursion near their home in Bern; the elder Weizsäcker was at that time Germany’s ambassador to Switzerland. Heisenberg later wrote his mother

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