About this item
After World War II most scientists in Germany maintained that they had been apolitical or actively resisted the Nazi regime but the true story is much more complicated In Serving the Reich Philip Ball takes a fresh look at that controversial history contrasting the career of Peter Debye director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin with those of two other leading physicists in Germany during the Third Reich Max Planck the elder statesman of physics after whom Germanys premier scientific society is now named and Werner Heisenberg who succeeded Debye as director of the institute when it became focused on the development of nuclear power and weapons Mixing history science and biography Balls gripping exploration of the lives of scientists under Nazism offers a powerful portrait of moral choice and personal responsibility as scientists navigated the grey zone between complicity and resistance Balls account of the different choices these three men and their colleagues made shows how there can be no clear-cut answers or judgement of their conduct Yet despite these ambiguities Ball makes it undeniable that the German scientific establishment as a whole mounted no serious resistance to the Nazis and in many ways acted as a willing instrument of the state Serving the Reich considers what this problematic history can tell us about the relationship of science and politics today Ultimately Ball argues a determination to present science as an abstract inquiry into nature that is above politics can leave science and scientists dangerously compromised and vulnerable to political manipulation.
About the Author
Philip Ball (born 1962) is an English science writer. He holds a degree in chemistry from Oxford and a doctorate in physics from Bristol University. He was an editor for the journal Nature for over 10 years. He now writes a regular column in Chemistry World. Ball's most-popular book is the 2004 Critical Mass: How One Things Leads to Another, winner of the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. It examines a wide range of topics including the business cycle, random walks, phase transitions, bifurcation theory, traffic flow, Zipf's law, Small world phenomenon, catastrophe theory, the Prisoner's dilemma. The overall theme is one of applying modern mathematical models to social and economic phenomena.
