Science and the Swastika
Season 1
Ep 4. The Good German
- April 7, 2001
- 48 min
Why did the Germans, the most advanced scientific nation, fail to build a nuclear bomb during the War? Werner Heisenberg, the chief scientist of Germany's wartime nuclear project, pioneered quantum mechanics and won the Nobel Prize. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 Heisenberg's friends begged him to leave Germany, knowing he would be asked to work on nuclear research for Hitler but he refused.
