the German Nuclear Program: "uranium club"
"In view of the possibility that England and the United States might undertake the development of atomic weapons, the German Army Ordnance Office created a special research group, under Schumann, whose task it was to examine the possibilities of the technical exploitation of atomic energy...the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute fur Physik in Berlin-Dahlem was nominated as the scientific center for the new research project. As early as September 1939 a number of nuclear physicists and experts in related fields were assigned to this problem."
- Werner Heisenberg
"Research in Germany on the Technical Application of Atomic Energy", August 16, 1947
"Virus-Haus was the cover name of a small laboratory in Berlin-Dahlem in which at the beginning of World War II, the first German experimental research work on the utilization of atomic energy took place."
- Werner Heisenerg, "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: The Third Reich and the Atomic Bomb", June 1968. Photo: "www.fu-berlin.de"
WERNER HEISENBERG
"Leading scientist on the German atomic power project"
- Samuel A. Goudsmit
Samuel A. Goudsmit Papers, 1921-1979
- Samuel A. Goudsmit
Samuel A. Goudsmit Papers, 1921-1979
"Heisenberg's reformulation of the basic concepts of physics is at least as revolutionary as Einstein's modification of the laws of Newton."
- Samuel A. Goudsmit
Samuel A. Goudsmit Papers, 1921-1979
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"Heisenberg went to the Maximilian school in Munich until 1920, when he went to the University of Munich to study physics under Sommerfeld. During the winter of 1922-1923 he went to Gottingen to study physics under Max Born. In 1923 he took his Ph.D at the University of Gottingen. From 1924 until 1925 he worked, with a Rockefeller Grant, with Niels Bohr, at the University of Copenhagen, returning for the summer of 1925 to Gottingen. In 1926 he was appointed Lecturer in Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen under Niels Bohr and in 1927, when he was only 26, he was appointed professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Leipzig." "When war did come, Heisenberg found himself assigned to a study of the possibility of atomic energy. Heisenberg was at first a consultant to the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute in Dahlem, near Berlin, and during that time continued to live in Leipzig. For the next five and a half years this problem took most of his time and energy. He developed the theory of a nuclear reactor. The Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute was then under military control, but after a reorganization in 1942 it was returned to the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft and Heisenberg was made director." |
additional key members
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