Heinrich Hertz and the tragedy of German Science

I learned things in my electronics class.  Not always things in the curriculum...because I kept wandering down interesting side paths.  For instance, we studied alternating current wave forms.  Ooh, compelling stuff.  Nah, only useful stuff.  But the unit of frequency for wave forms is hertz.  As in kilohertz, megahertz, etc.  I got to wondering who this was named after....and a remarkable but sad story emerged.  In a sense it is a condensed version of the larger somber tale of how German science and industry was bent to evil purposes in the first half of the 20th century.....

Meet Heinrich Rudolph Hertz.  A brilliant polymath he was accomplished not only in physics and engineering but learned Arabic and Sanskrit.  Although he had the previous theoretical work of Maxwell to build on he was the first scientist to prove the wave nature of electrical and magnetic fields.  Having basically just proven the principles on which radio, AC current and most modern electronics function he was asked what practical use he saw in this.  His answer?

"Nothing, I guess."

Heinrich Hertz died in 1894 at the young age of 34.  Cause of death was a disease I learned as "Wegner's Granulomatosis".  In recent years it has been renamed, as it turns out that Herr Docktor Wegener did some dodgy medical experiments involving concentration camp inmates.

Meet Gustav Ludwig Hertz, nephew of Heinrich.

Also a very bright fellow, he was one half of the team that presented the Franck-Hertz experiments to the scientific community in April of 1914.  These studied the electrical properties of gases in a vacuum and demonstrated the quantum nature of atoms. 

Oh, and about 1914 and gases....

Hertz served in the German army during WW I, in a special unit commanded by Fritz Haber that for the first time developed and deployed poison gas in warfare.  Pioneer Regiment 35/36 had no fewer than four future Nobel Prize winners in its ranks.  Franck and Hertz won the Physics prize in 1925.  Otto Hahn discovered nuclear fission and won the 1944 Nobel for chemistry despite carrying on his research in Berlin!  (To be fair it was only announced post war).  Fritz Haber topped them all.  He won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1918.....at a time when the acrid stench of poison gas still lingered in the depths of shattered battlefields.

An interesting reflection on a different mind set.  Haber won his prize for discovering a way that atmospheric nitrogen could be "fixed" and utilized in chemical reactions.  It allowed the mass manufacture of high explosives that tore apart millions of soldiers.  Also the commercial production of fertilizers that fed billions of civilians.  How different from our "woke" modern attitude that requires past figures be subjected to modern judgments, their statues removed, their presence in texts erased or marked with asterisks!

It has become fashionable to condemn any questioning of science as an "attack" and those who do so as "deniers".  But let's be fair, brilliant men are far from omniscient. H. Hertz discounting electromagnetic waves as a clever parlor trick.  Haber, Hahn and G. Hertz not seeing past their equations to gasping and incinerated bodies.  But in the epilogue to this tale there are rays both of dark and light.

James Franck and Gustav Hertz arranged to defect to the Russians at the end of World War II.  They worked on the Soviet nuclear program which thankfully to date has never been used in war.

Gustav's Hertz's defection meant that his son, Carl, also a physicist would not be allowed to work in the US.  A POW captured in North Africa he went post war to Sweden where he pioneered inkjet technology and performed the first cardiac ultrasound.  

Otto Hahn was also captured by the Western Allies.  When given the news of Hiroshima and Nagasaki he was appalled at the direction his work had taken.  His immediate response was to get very drunk.  In the longer term he became a prominent advocate for the abolition of nuclear weapons entirely.

Ah, but Fritz Haber had the strangest journey.  He continued work in secret on poison gas in the post WW I era.  But being of Jewish ancestry he fell into disfavor with the rise of the Nazi regime.  Remarkably he was invited to emigrate to England, where he worked for a few years. 

Fritz Haber

Finally Chaim Weizmann reached out to Haber, inviting him to come to Jerusalem and head up the Sieff Research Institute.  In failing health, Haber died en route.

The Sieff was later renamed the Weizmann Institute, premier academic organization of the post WWII state of Israel.  It was of course named for Chaim Weizmann, first President of Israel and a man who attained his early scientific fame by devising a method of making high explosive cordite by fermenting starch, thereby making his own contribution to the ability to destroy human life on a grand and grotesque scale.