So, I now finished chapter 14, and read all the preambles, prolog, epilog & co.
The trouble (for me) with Heisenberg is that it seems "pretty fashionable" to claim that "the behavior of Heisenberg" was problematic, or that "Heisenberg was a pretty horrible person". And of course, since Heisenberg was no angle (like most of us), there is some truth to such statements. But even with a complete and explicit (and reasonable) justification, it can still be troublesome. Take for example:
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6576#comment-1941742
Heisenberg was a pretty horrible person. It is true that he was not a nazi. But he was a hard line German nationalist. It is true that he didn’t like Hitler. But he did support Hitler’s war and simply believed that the nazis would be replaced by quality people after the war. He believed that the nazis could be tamed in about 50 years. Good luck with that. It is true that he was not particularly anti Jewish. But he believed that revolutions were inherently messy and the harm done to the Jewish population was an acceptable side effect of a political movement that would put Germany in it’s rightful place on the world stage. It is True that Heisenberg steered Germany away from the Bomb. But it was his honest assessment that the massive resources needed to develop the bomb would distract from the war effort and was very unlikely to produce results before the end of the war. He was probably correct.
Watch this:
[link to a video which is is “probably indefensible, once one starts to dig into details”]
The text is well argued, and the used information seems to be true, based on all that I have read about Heisenberg. But it ends with a link to a video that claims much more, and paints a very sinister picture of Heisenberg. And this time, the information often seems surprising, and contradict what I believed to know. So I start checking, and after one or two clear refutations, I conclude that its claims are “probably indefensible, once one starts to dig into details”:
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6576#comment-1941826
But in fact, things are even more complicated than that. Both Samuel Goudsmit (in 1947) and Leslie Groves (in 1962) tried to suggest that Heisenberg was too stupid to build an atomic bomb, and believed the critical mass to be in the order of tons. They claimed that the secret Farm Hall protocols would contain statements by Heisenberg that proved that. But when the protocols were released in the 90s, they painted a very different picture. ... But they also contained the moment were von Weizsäcker sort of invented "their defense," which strongly hint to me that "We can safely assume that Heisenberg’s and von Weizsäcker’s version from 1957 of what happened in Copenhagen is completetly fabricated." So all involved parties including Goudsmit, Groves, Heisenberg & co. lied to smaller or bigger extents, and all had their own sorts of agendas.
Given all this conundrum, it would have been interesting of having a completely independent demonstration of problematic behavior by Heisenberg, especially in connection with Born. Greenspan's book is nice in this that it at least reports relevant rumors around Heisenberg's behavior, and also the results of Greenspan's own attempts to verify or refute those rumors. At least I learned that Heisenberg already got attacked (by rumors) much earlier than the war and the atomic bomb project. Perhaps the best theory why is that he really was actually horrible. At least my other theories cannot really handle that early opposition. There are definitively many strange things about him, for example, it seems like he never published together with Niels Bohr (despite claiming that their philosophy and viewpoints would closely match), and he didn't care when Bohr warned him not to publish something. And he piles the highest praise on Bohr, but at the same time describes in nasty detail how Bohr mercilessly tried to convince Schrödinger that he was wrong, continuing even after Schrödinger felt ill. And he also describes with glee other weaknesses of Bohr, like that his lectures were often bad and hard to understand.
