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The uncertainty principle to the atomic bomb: Heisenberg, the hero / bastard

David Caviglioli

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Posted on 15-03-2015 at 18:01

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Three years after his Prix Goncourt, Jerome Ferrari dedicated a novel to the German physicist, a pioneer of quantum mechanics, which tried to equip the Nazis bomb while he had no sympathy for Hitler.

Werner Heisenberg (Sipa)

In the television series "Breaking Bad," a small chemistry teacher named Walter White, learning that he will die from lung cancer and wishing to his family from want, decided to make and sell the methamphetamine, far more lucrative than teaching. His criminal metamorphosis is completed in a famous scene where a gang leader asked his name. He must choose his dealer pseudonym. Unawares, he said: ". Heisenberg"Under this moniker Germanic world famous today, it will become one of the worst sociopaths that pop culture has given birth.

Walter White explains this choice later by his admiration for the German physicist Werner Heisenberg, Nobel Prize 1932, hero of quantum mechanics which stated the famous uncertainty principle in 1927. But the dedication is also a confession of guilt: to Conversely Einstein, anti-Nazi effigy symbolizes Heisenberg in the history of science moral compromise and collaboration with evil. This native of Bavaria in 1933 chose to stay in Germany. He taught at the University of Leipzig, where he was lifting the arm at the beginning of each course, and where it was forbidden to mention the Jewish physicists. He did not even content with being complicit passivity during the war, he led the uranium project, a rival of the Manhattan Project, which was to provide the Third Reich of the atomic bomb.

Well told, the Heisenberg case seems bent. Yet it is of unfathomable complexity "Put all the elements of his life on paper: You will award him a medal or you send it in prison, said Jerome Ferrari It is undecidable..."Three years after the Goncourt prize, the author of the "Sermon on the fall of Rome" dedicates "the Principle", his new novel, Werner Heisenberg. Like the book, rare event, released simultaneously in Germany, it is met in Berlin at the end of February, in the Embassy of France in which a party is given in his honor.

Jerome Ferrari (Sipa)

"Excess rationality"

Heisenberg was it a pure bastard, as some think historians? "A stereotypical figure of the blind German scholar in politics," as says the physicist and writer Stephen Klein, present that night in Berlin, which lent his expertise to the novel Ferrari? "This is one of our greatest geniuses, but his image here revolves exclusively around his collaboration with the Nazis, sums up Christian Ruzicska, translator and publisher of German Ferrari, while we walk in still scarred central Berlin city occupied by history. It embodies the capitulation academics. "

Germany has just bury Richard von Weizsäcker, former federal president, who had served as a captain in the Wehrmacht during the war. His brother, Carl von Weizsäcker physicist Heisenberg had just worked with the uranium project, was detained with him to England after the war. Heisenberg which, as Ferrari found rummaging through his still unpublished correspondence, had a history love with Adelaide von Weizsäcker, their sister. At the funeral of the President, in the beautiful Berlin Cathedral facing the university, it was Martin Heisenberg, son of Werner, himself married to a von Weizsäcker.In Germany, great lines, it is difficult to draw a clear line between war and post-war between the fall and recovery.

But Heisenberg is not Heidegger. He never had sympathy for Hitler or Nazism. "Unless we discover a black book somewhere ..." says Ferrari. In "Part and the Whole" autobiography published in 1969, and thus inevitably suspect advantageously rewrite the past, the physicist describes the years 1933 to 1945 as an intense moral puzzle. Seeing his Jewish colleagues emigrate, hostile to anti-Semitism and finding "the actions of authorities in university life [...] more odious", he seeks advice from Max Planck on how to proceed. It urged him to stay. To create "islands of stability" from which it will be possible to rebuild Germany, "once the disaster." Planck said:

If you could leave Germany, (...) you would be out of danger, and after the end of the disaster, you may, if you so desire, return to Germany; you will have a clear conscience, because you will not compromise with the destroyers of Germany. (...)

If, against you waive give your resignation and you stay here, you have before you a task of a different nature. (...) From first glance, I say concerning the future reconstruction of scientific research in Germany. But as no one knows what role science and technology will come to play in the world of tomorrow, it will also become important in broader areas.

I believe that all those who can do something here, and not just hard - especially for racial reasons - to emigrate, should try to stay here to prepare a more distant future.

In his novel, Ferrari puts this sacrificial Project Max Planck compared with the poignant image of old scientific "doing hi Nazi during an inauguration ceremony, repeating it three times, as if the old trembling hand humiliation he had to stand became a cast iron hand. "Anyway, Heisenberg closes with his mentor. He writes:

This task included inevitably compromise acceptance, the risk of being sanctioned later rightly so; perhaps it included the worst things. [...] I would not mind where that path would lead me.

It's the result further. In 1939, drafted into the army, he learns that he will "work for the study of technical applications of atomic energy." It includes as soon as the horizon of this program is the deadliest bomb of all time.When the destruction of Hiroshima ended the war in 1945, it has already been captured by the Allies. It is secluded at Farm Hall, England, with his comrades in the uranium project. He is horrified by the news, and still stung his pride to have underperformed.

Thereafter, he will explain to his detractors that the true purpose of his research was an energy reactor. To the skeptics, he will say that the army, seeing that the manufacture of the bomb would be too expensive and take too long, never forced to ask too pressing moral issues. But his research the pride he surpassed? In 1941 he visited the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, his old friend, to express his doubts. Bohr remembered as a Heisenberg determined to overcome the technical barriers that separated the great apocalyptic mushroom. This famous meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg, which resulted in numerous films and plays, is the ambiguity of the case.Heisenberg remembers the way:

I tried to explain to Niels that in principle could make atomic bombs, it would take an enormous technical effort and that we physicists were to ask us if we had the right to work on this problem.Unfortunately, Niels was so frightened by my first hints about the theoretical possibility of making atomic bombs he was not able to understand what I wanted to say [...].

"He wanted to build the bomb, it is clear, on the contrary believes Etienne Klein. He did not succeed because of a miscalculation. I find it hard to empathize with Heisenberg. This is a fairly dull character, very academic. I also suspected to have remained in Germany by the university to taste. "

Ferrari rather takes the party to believe in his sincerity. "What made me switch in his direction, that is what he wrote during the war, his '' Manuscript 1942 '', full of allusions to White Rose [German anti-Nazi resistance movement]. When you read it, it seems difficult to doubt.Although I must immediately add that some use the 'Manuscript' 'to prove that he was determined to save Germany. "

We pointed out to him that Heisenberg, who said sacrifice to rebuild the world, nonetheless agreed to work to its destruction. Nazi Germany was able to function because its elites had made the choice to remain in his service, and silence their dissensions. Others did not, as the soft Hans Euler, invited by Heisenberg to join the Uranium Project, who preferred to engage in aviation and suicide, probably during its first flight in 1941.

Of course, meets Ferrari. At the same time, Heisenberg actually participated in the reconstruction of the German university after 1945. It is a fact that the project did not fall into the water.

When you are at the margins, business is simple.There are heroic fates and destinies heinous. But in between, where most people lie, things are less clear. What strikes me about Heisenberg, it is primarily an excess of rationality: it has an almost pathological ability to consider a problem from an angle, and the angle opposite, and the angle opposite the opposite angle at point of not being able to make a decision. In "Part and the Whole", he told his categorical opposition to the Nazis, but can not hate them. He speaks of "these brave young people."

Quantum Fiction

The narrator of "Principle" is addressed directly to Heisenberg, he vous, a "you" both fraternal and severe. The long, undulating phrase Ferrari, where everything is turning, rocking back and forth between the criticism and empathy as to accommodate within it all the ambivalence of its subject. This unstable, oscillatory form, reflecting the uncertain Heinseberg, is also a successful poetic transposition confusing expected from quantum physics.

The story begins in 1924 in Helgoland, Lunar Archipelago of the North Sea. "You had twenty-three years and it is there on this desolate island where no flower grows, it was given to you for the first time look over the shoulder of God. "Heisenberg there is revelation, almost mystical, that behind" the thin material surface of things, "there is nothing you can describe. The atom, contrary to what one says to children, is "not a miniature solar system in which sympathetic electrons déroul [ent] peacefully their orbits around the nucleus debonair"; it is "nonsense concentrate", a place where "the exercise of thought becomes physically painful."

Three years later, Heisenberg give birth to his "uncertainty principle" or "indeterminacy" that one can not know both the velocity and position of a particle. Or, to formulate the problem in a way that best shows its oddity: if we try to measure the speed of a particle, it has no position, and vice versa.The basics of quantum mechanics abstruse are asked: the subatomic scale, our intuition is null and void; we can no longer distinguish the measured object of the observer who measures it.

With this leap towards abstraction, Heisenberg was the first to understand that we are on the threshold of new physics, explains Etienne Klein. At the time, some still thought they were dealing with the same objects as in classical physics, just a little less knowable. Heisenberg shows that this other objects.But how to describe them? The poetic representation of the atom is a very important issue.Against the abstraction of Heisenberg, Schrödinger offers for example the image of the "wave packet".For him, this representation is more beautiful and therefore more real.

Etienne Klein (Sipa)

Etienne Klein conducts research at the Commission for Atomic Energy, teaches philosophy of science at Central, is one of the designers of the famous particle collider at CERN, and has written several books on the spontaneous generation of quantum geniuses Einstein to Pauli. He devoted a literary narrative Ettore Majorana, the dazzling Sicilian who disappeared without a trace. Shortly before it, the novelist Philippe Forest published "Schrödinger's Cat" , using the famous parable of the feline both dead and alive as we do not see it as a metaphor for the human duality.

French literature, almost a century after the revolution begins to quantum hour. "These researchers are novel characters, advance Klein. In a few years they have created everything. What there is fun, at home, is that their biographies are found in their theories. Schrödinger cat with his double, leading himself a double life, with several women. Heisenberg resembles his uncertainty principle. "

But out of the charm of these great scholars, why would they go novelists confront those unfathomable quantum? Philippe Forest:

It is not a question for the novel to come illustrate a truth that science would have established, and to propose poetic translation, but to draw the material for his fables. Epigraph of my novel on Schrödinger this sentence I quoted Picasso: "When I read a book on Einstein's physics which I do not understand, it does not matter: it will make me understandsomething else."
Quantum physics gives a strictly scientific discourse vertiginous character in collusion with our consciousness of the world. From what I understand, science notes very problematic status of knowledge it produces, which boils down to more reasonable old patterns inherited from Aristotle. The sub-atomic universe seems resistant to any form of mental representation.

From there arise all kinds of questions on the same status of reality, our ability to know, our claim to make speeches that say the meaning. The scientist and the novelist are before the world as a conundrum which the last word escapes them.

In "Principle" Ferrari deals Heisenberg as a laboratory technician examines a particle in a Wilson chamber. Observe the movement that leads to moral capitulation, you shall know nothing of his position. Try to determine its position, you will not see the speed of his fall. His mind, as the subatomic world is unrepresentable contradictory. It can not be reduced to univocal, monolithic desires, like atoms in pretty much smooth spheres.

Ferrari has this book in mind for years "The initial project was not all policy," he said.:

In the course of writing, I've come to get excited about this history of atomic bomb. But I really wanted to write about the relationship between language and reality. The paradoxes of quantum physics come from what we understand the world is structured by the concepts of language, we can not improve, but which are inapplicable to this scale.

In his autobiography, Heisenberg tells a visit to Niels Bohr in 1933. They walk, play poker, make music, discuss metaphysics. One evening, Bohr did the dishes and said, "This is the dishwashing like language. We have a dirty rinse water and dirty rags, and yet we manage to clean the plates and glasses "Ferrari nods." Language is a lousy tool we are forced to use for an impossible task. This is a clear illustration of what the literature. "

David Caviglioli

Principle by Jerome Ferrari
Actes Sud, 162 p., 16.50 euros.

The Part and The Whole by Werner Heisenberg
Champs Flammarion, 420 p., 13.50 euros.

Seeking Majorana by Etienne Klein
Folio, 208 p., 7 euros.