The German Genius

detail.” Einstein was never happy with the basic notion of quantum theory, that the subatomic world could be understood only statistically. It remained a bone of contention between him and Bohr until the end of his life. 7
    Several physicists were not very happy with Einstein himself. These were the “anti-relativists,” notably Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark. Both Lenard and Stark were good scientists but, as the 1920s passed, they convinced themselves that relativity was a bogus Jewish science. Lenard, memorably described as having an “angry beard,” was Hungarian but had studied in Germany under Heinrich Hertz and became his assistant. 8 He himself won the Nobel Prize (in 1905) for showing that cathode rays could pass through atoms, confirming how much atoms were made of empty space. Despite his experimental brilliance, however, Lenard was a great hater—he delivered a series of lectures in 1920 attacking relativity, although by then some of its predictions had been confirmed experimentally. And in 1929 he published a book of scientific biographies, designed to show that “Aryan-Germans” were a leading creative/innovative force and attributing other discoveries, by Jews and foreigners, to little-known, but always German, individuals.
    Stark was another Nobel Prize winner, in 1919 for “the Stark effect,” the influence of electrical fields on spectral lines. Surrounded by “Einstein lovers” at the University of Würzburg, he resigned his chair and was not to get another until the Nazis came to power. 9 But he wrote a book, Die gegenwärtige Krise der deutschen Physik ( The Contemporary Crisis in German Physics ), which argued that relativity was part of the cultural malaise then afflicting the Weimar Republic, followed by an article, “Hitlergeist und Wissenschaft” (The Hitler Spirit and Science), written jointly with Lenard, in the Grossdeutsche Zeitung in May 1924, in which they compared Hitler with the giants of science. This marked the emergence of “Deutsche Physik” (German physics), which eschewed relativity and quantum theory, arguing that they were too theoretical, too abstract, and “threatened to undermine intuitive, mechanical models of the world.” 10
    Yet the fresh data that the new physics was producing had very practical ramifications that arguably have changed our lives far more directly than was at first envisaged by scientists mainly interested in fundamental aspects of nature. Radio moved into the home in the 1920s; television was first demonstrated in August 1928. Another invention using physics revolutionized life in a completely different way: this was the jet engine, developed almost simultaneously by the Englishman Frank Whittle and the German Hans von Ohain.
    In the early 1930s, Ohain, a student of physics and aerodynamics at the University of Göttingen, had had much the same idea as Whittle. But whereas Whittle tried to enlist the aid of the British government, Ohain took his idea to the private plane-maker, Ernst Heinkel. 11 Heinkel, who realized that high-speed air transport was much needed, took von Ohain seriously from the very start. A meeting was called at Heinkel’s country residence, at Warnemünde on the Baltic coast, where the twenty-five-yearold Ohain was faced by some of the plane-maker’s leading aeronautical brains. Despite his youth, Ohain was offered a contract, which featured a royalty on all engines that might be sold. 12 This contract, which had nothing to do with the air ministry, or the Luftwaffe, was signed in April 1936, one month after Whittle concluded a deal for Power Jets, the company eventually formed in Britain between a firm of city bankers, the Air Ministry, and Whittle himself. Between the British company being formed, and Ohain’s agreement, Britain’s defense budget was increased from £122 million to £158 million, partly to pay for 250 more aircraft for the Fleet Air Arm. Four days later, German troops occupied the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland, thus violating the Treaty of Versailles. War suddenly became much more likely, a war in which air superiority might well (and did) prove crucial.
    The intellectual overlap between physics and mathematics has always been considerable. In the case of Heisenberg’s matrices and Schrödinger’s calculations, the advances made in physics in the golden age involved the development of new forms of mathematics. By the end of the 1920s, the twenty-three outstanding mathematical