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about fission. Heisenberg’s own path seemed to lead inexorably toward a bomb. He discussed it with colleagues in Germany; outside Germany its presence in his conversation was implicit. In summer 1939 Heisenberg came to the United States for a series of meetings with American and emigré scientists. Heisenberg avoided talking about the prospect of war, though he would do so if others insisted. The Americans avoided talk of atomic bombs. Wherever Heisenberg went—Cal-Berkeley to visit Robert Oppenheimer, the University of Chicago for Arthur H. Compton, to the University of Rochester, Purdue, and Columbia—his friends urged him to stay in the United States. He was pressed especially at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he arrived in late July. The Dutch physicist Samuel Goudsmit was there, as was Enrico Fermi, and Fermi’s former assistant Edoardo Amaldi, who was hoping to get permanently out of Italy, and a graduate student named Max Dresden, who served as bartender at a party one Sunday afternoon. Half a century later, he recalled the conversation. Fermi, Goudsmit, and others doubted that a scientist could ‘maintain his scientific integrity and personal self-respect in a country where all standards of decency and humanity had been suspended’. Heisenberg disagreed, arguing that his reputation in Germany would compel even the worst government to see scientific matters his way. Fermi dismissed this as Panglossian: ‘These people have no principles,’ he said of the Nazis, and ‘will kill anybody who might be a threat... You have only the influence they grant you.’ In the end, Heisenberg reverted to the argument he made everywhere that summer: he was a loyal German—loyal, that is, to an organic Germany, not some temporary German government—and German science needed him. He would go back. Things could not be that bad.17

Heisenberg’s relationship with the Nazi state was complicated. While he had not welcomed Hitler’s arrival in early 1933, he was relatively sanguine about the resiliency of the polity in the long run and the continued independence and efficacy of German science. When the eminent physicist Erwin Schrodinger resigned in protest from the University of Berlin in September 1933, Heisenberg got angry with him, ‘since he was neither Jewish nor otherwise endangered’. Of the Nazi regime he wrote a month later: ‘much that is good is now... being tried, and one should recognize good intentions.’ In 1938 Heisenberg, assigned to the army, almost went to war over the Sudetenland grab; he was spared by the Allied capitulation at Munich. He was no subversive, no ethical hero. At best, he hoped to temporize with the regime so he could get on with his scientific work.18

In fairness—and it is necessary to bend over backwards to find much sympathy for him—Heisenberg had a frightening encounter with the most rabid representatives of the Nazi apparatus. In the late 1920s two disgruntled scientists, Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark, once well regarded but now increasingly left behind by the new thinking in theoretical physics, began writing and speaking on behalf of what they called deutsche physics. They insisted that true physics sprang naturally from Aryan soil and was thus deeply connected with ‘purely’ German culture. The dangerous opposite of deutsche physics was ‘Jewish physics’, which in the form of relativity theory and quantum mechanics truckled to the devil. Science, proclaimed Lenard, was not international in scope but instead ‘conditioned by race, by blood’. One need not, it turned out, be Jewish to be accused of practicing Jewish physics. When in 1935 Heisenberg was being put forward as successor to his old teacher Arnold Sommerfeld at Munich, Stark and Lenard intervened, demanding that Hitler’s government prevent the high-level appointment of a scientific heretic. In the summer of 1937, Stark placed an article in the SS newspaper Das Schwarze Corps, in which he attacked Heisenberg as one of several weisse Juden (white Jews). The appointment to Munich was held up while Heisenberg fought back. Using a faint family