by Sam Kean
Still, even Heisenberg’s endorsement couldn’t get Goudsmit what he really wanted—a job. Professorships in Europe were scarce in the 1920s, and young scientists basically had to wait around until some old goat croaked, then scramble like hyenas for the spot. In particular, the job Goudsmit most coveted, at a university in Holland, virtually required a Nobel Prize as a prerequisite. Really, only American universities, especially the University of Michigan, seemed serious about hiring him—which put him in a difficult position. For Dutch people at the time, he said, the only reason you’d move to America was “to evade the police or the draft,” and Ann Arbor in particular seemed like the other side of the world. But the university paid well, and his partner Uhlenbeck had already accepted an offer there. So even though, as he later said, “I always felt like a deserter for having left,” Goudsmit scooped up his young wife Jaantje and sailed for America. Robert Oppenheimer himself—future head of the Manhattan Project—met the Goudsmits and Uhlenbecks in New York and introduced them to their first American delicacy, corn on the cob.
Goudsmit’s first home in Ann Arbor consisted of one room in a rooming house, with no bathroom or kitchen. He and Jaantje had two windows, one overlooking a sick ward, one a cemetery. And sadly, his general view of Ann Arbor didn’t improve much over the years. He was a dandyish Jew with a dopey smile and a cynical sense of humor that clashed with midwestern earnestness. People couldn’t quite warm up to him as a foreigner, either: they asked him repeatedly about tulips and wooden shoes, and his nickname of “Uncle Sam” no doubt just reinforced how un-American he felt. Other prejudices he encountered were more pernicious. Goudsmit cringed to learn that the university had dorm rooms set aside “for gentiles only.” Then a history professor announced one semester that he planned to weed out all the Jews in his class by midterms. To make matters worse, Goudsmit didn’t fit in with other Jews in the area, either. Most were Mitteleuropean types who looked askance at him because he didn’t speak Yiddish. As a result of all this, Goudsmit and Jaantje found Ann Arbor lonely. The highlight of their social week was Friday night, when he’d invite his graduate students over for pancakes. At one point, Goudsmit saw an advertisement for a professorship in Egypt and applied immediately. Even the Sahara, he figured, couldn’t be worse than Michigan.
Worst of all, his scientific career was languishing. In contrast to Heisenberg, Goudsmit struggled to live up to his early promise, making no new discoveries in the late 1920s. Outwardly he blamed this on working in the intellectual desert of Ann Arbor, light-years away from the scientific hubs of Berlin and Amsterdam and Paris. Deep down, though, he knew he simply didn’t have the intellectual chops to contribute much to modern physics. “It was outside the capacity of my brain,” he once admitted. He began to fear he’d gotten lucky in discovering spin, and by 1931 he was already referring to himself as a has-been in speeches. When Heisenberg won the Nobel Prize in 1932, Goudsmit was no doubt happy for his friend and idol, but he felt a stab of envy as well. If he could only win a Nobel of his own, he could return to Holland to work. But year after year passed with no call from Stockholm.
His misery culminated over the next few years. A beloved mentor back in the Netherlands committed suicide. As the Great Depression deepened, paychecks became sporadic, and he fretted about being laid off. He was forced to give up a beloved dog (it barked too much), and someone broke into his lab and stole some equipment. He also missed out on an important discovery in 1937, perhaps the worst year of all. Hoping to revitalize his career, he’d recently switched from theoretical to experimental work, and because the University of Michigan owned a cyclotron, he decided to focus on the hot field of neutron research. (Specifically, he wanted to investigate the magnetic properties of neutrons.) The only problem was, he needed large blocks of time on the cyclotron, and a visiting professor was hogging it week after week. Worse still, an assistant of Goudsmit’s, who should have been on his side, began working with the other scientist behind his back, a humiliating betrayal. This situation led to several confrontations between the scientists—confrontations Goudsmit usually lost. After a while he could barely stomach going in to work: “Every day I had to start with a pep talk like a football coach,” he recalled. “Unfortunately I did not use enough swear words.” The dispute cost Goudsmit dearly. A team in Denmark was doing similar research, and although Goudsmit had started a year earlier, the Danish team had regular access to a cyclotron and ended up finishing first and scooping him.
Frustrated with Midwest life, Goudsmit took off for a sabbatical in Europe in 1938. He visited several top institutes and dozens of colleagues across the continent. He also spent time in Paris, a city he adored, and threw a coin in the Trevi Fountain in Rome to ensure a swift return. Best of all, he saw scads of relatives in Holland. (He complained in his cynical way about the endless rounds of birthday parties and dinners, but his affection nevertheless shines through.) In taking the sabbatical Goudsmit suffered a huge pay cut (from $5,000 to $1,000; or $85,000 to $17,000 today), but the trip was worth it for his mental health. To his shock, he even received two job offers while abroad—including the very post he’d been coveting in Holland. They’d apparently decided to overlook his lack of a Nobel Prize, and if he accepted, he could return home at last.
But should he? Even in remote Michigan he’d heard rumblings that Europe was no longer safe for Jews: he’d in fact upbraided the university library for subscribing to pro-Nazi periodicals, and had resigned his membership in a German physics society for not denouncing attacks against Jewish members. And what he saw firsthand on his sabbatical only deepened his anxiety. As he entered Germany and Italy, border guards confiscated his copies of The New Yorker and The Saturday Evening Post, declaring them decadent propaganda, and private papers were stolen from his hotel room in Rome. Moreover, he was present in Holland when his friend Dirk Coster smuggled Lise Meitner across the border—a blatant reminder of the threat he faced. Most frightening of all, he saw Nazi mobs marching in the streets of various cities. “The main German export” nowadays, he declared in one letter, is “propaganda of hatred.” He began calling the people there Germaniacs.
Still, he couldn’t quite let go of his old dream of winning a professorship in Holland, and after returning to Ann Arbor in October 1938, he spent the next month talking himself into accepting the offer. His main concern was this: if he said no, the university would feel snubbed, and he’d never work in Holland again. Besides, were things really that bad abroad? Germany was awful, yes, but he was going to Holland—“an oasis in the European desert,” as he called it. He also suspected that Germany’s military might was overrated. France had always had a formidable army, he told friends, and would stand up to the Germaniacs in any war. Hitler was probably bluffing anyway. “As a Hollander with an objective outlook,” he wrote to one friend, “I still bet 6 to 1 there will be no war in 1939.”
However badly he wanted to believe that, fear of Germany finally won out. Hitler had already annexed Austria and much of Czechoslovakia, and if he hadn’t respected those borders, why would he respect the border of meek, defenseless Holland? More importantly, Goudsmit had a daughter now, Esther, and no matter how much he coveted a professorship in his homeland, he couldn’t stomach the thought of exposing her to Hitler. With a heavy heart he wrote to the university and turned down the job. His parents were crushed by his decision.
Having closed the door on Europe professionally, he now made plans to extricate his parents from the Continent to shield them from danger. He knew it wouldn’t be easy. In getting married, Isaac and Marianne had overcome serious social barriers—she came from a wealthy family, while he was the nephew of their maid—and both now ran successful businesses in The Hague, businesses they were reluctant to abandon. His father carved furniture and sold bathroom fixtures; Goudsmit always joked about the “beautiful, shiny, hand-polished mahogany toilet seats.” His mother ran a shop that designed women’s hats. (Apparently the young Samuel had had a gift for spotting fashion trend
s, and Marianne often took his advice on new designs. “That one ought to have a flower instead of a feather,” he’d say, and he was invariably right.) Life in Holland was all Isaac and Marianne knew, and they couldn’t fathom moving to America. But Goudsmit pressed them to reconsider and began applying for immigration visas.
In the meantime, perhaps to mask his disappointment over the lost job, Goudsmit threw his energy into another task: organizing Michigan’s annual summer physics camp.
A decade old at that point, the camp drew top scientists to Michigan from across the world for seminars and lectures—Robert Oppenheimer, Paul Dirac, Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli. Everyone stayed in a frat house near campus and took field trips together on their days off, visiting lions and bears at the zoo and heading to the local beach to drink malted milks and zip down the waterslide in black Tarzanesque swimsuits with shoulder straps. (Less successful were the baseball games: the scientists proved pretty clumsy.) Surrounding himself with Europeans eased Goudsmit’s isolation, and after returning from Europe he put together his best lineup yet for the 1939 camp, securing both Enrico Fermi and Werner Heisenberg, two Nobel Prize winners. Goudsmit was especially happy to land Heisenberg. He insisted that his old friend stay at his home, and he sweetened the deal by offering Heisenberg—a passionate musician who sometimes lectured on Mozart’s operas—a piano to play during his stay. Other scientists were no less enthused. One told Goudsmit that he was considering flying to Ann Arbor in an airplane, an unheard-of extravagance then, just to meet the man.
By the time the camp rolled around, in the last week of July, people could barely contain their excitement. Seminar topics included cosmic rays and uranium fission, and Goudsmit had scheduled plenty of time for drinks and socializing. All in all, it was shaping up as the best session ever. And it might have been, if not for one thing. Just like in Europe, the specter of Adolf Hitler loomed over Ann Arbor that summer. Despite all the exciting science, people were distracted and edgy, and however gamely they tried to confine themselves to physics, the chatter over drinks inevitably turned to war, war, war. This was especially true whenever they bumped into Heisenberg, who had to field a number of pointed questions about Germany’s conduct.
To be sure, Heisenberg was no politician, and he privately loathed the Nazis. But he was also arrogant, and like many intellectuals he assumed that his genius in one field qualified him to hold forth on other subjects. His patriotism got the better of him, too, and he kept moaning about how bad the whole political mess was for the good name of Deutschland. As if the German Volk were the real victims here. Not surprisingly, Heisenberg found himself in sparring matches night after night. How can you live there anymore? his friends demanded. Doesn’t your conscience revolt? Normally a confident man, Heisenberg found himself wrong-footed again and again. Little did people know, these were not simple questions for him to answer.
Heisenberg had arrived in Michigan shaken, having recently endured several run-ins with Nazi officials over alleged thought crimes. Specifically, they’d accused him of promoting “Jew physics” at the expense of “Aryan physics.”
He’d first heard of this nonsense while attending a lecture by Albert Einstein in 1922. When Heisenberg arrived at the auditorium, a protester shoved a red leaflet into his hand; it denounced Einstein as a fraud perpetrated by the Jew-run media. Heisenberg didn’t pay much attention—there’s always some nut at meetings, he figured—but then Einstein canceled the talk, citing threats of violence. Heisenberg later discovered that Philipp Lenard, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist from Germany, had organized the protest. And, emboldened by his success in stopping the lecture, Lenard soon expanded the attack on Einstein in articles and speeches, denouncing his theory of relativity as a “plot” hatched by Jews and Bolsheviks to undermine good, solid, Aryan physics. Above all Lenard and his ilk objected to the abstract and highly mathematical nature of relativity, which they contrasted with the tangible, intuitive physics of their youth. The whole uproar left Heisenberg baffled.
Unfortunately for him, Heisenberg proceeded to undermine good, solid, Aryan physics even more over the next few years—especially with the publication of his Uncertainty Principle in 1927. More than any other idea, Uncertainty marked a break between the classical physics that Lenard adored and the quantum mechanics that was quickly replacing it. As a result, even though Heisenberg was as German as mustard, Lenard and other Aryan physicists narrowed their eyes and grumbled whenever they saw him.
Characteristically—he was equal parts jolly and naïve—Heisenberg remained oblivious to their hostility. He therefore felt blindsided in January 1936 when another Nobel laureate, Johannes Stark, took a swipe at him in a newspaper polemic against “Jew physics.” Stark slammed Heisenberg again in a speech in February, calling him spiritual kin to that Jew Einstein. Shortly afterward, a state-run scientific institute reneged on an agreement to hire Heisenberg for a key post. Shocked, Heisenberg wrote a rebuttal to the article, but he was somehow able to convince himself that all was still well within German science.
That fond hope ended, abruptly, in July 1937—a year as painful to Heisenberg as it was to Goudsmit. Upon returning home to Munich after a trip, a friend alerted him to another article by Stark in Das Schwarze Korps (The Black Corps), the official SS newspaper. Its title was “White Jews in Science.” This full-page screed, rife with grammatical errors, rehashed several old arguments about decadent Jewish physics, then added something new and ugly. As if Jews weren’t bad enough, Stark fumed, we now have Aryan folks acting like Jews. “Common slang,” he wrote, “has coined a phrase for such bacteria: the ‘white Jew.’” Stark then singled out Heisenberg and bashed him for sheltering Jews and foreigners in his institute, as well as for refusing to join other Nobel Prize winners in declaring support for Der Führer. Reading all this, Heisenberg sank down in his chair, slack with disbelief. He then shot right back up upon reaching the conclusion: “These representatives of Judaism in German spiritual life… must all be eliminated just as the Jews themselves.”
Finally roused to action—he would not stand for an attack on his scientific honor—Heisenberg brought the article to the attention of Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS. Himmler’s father and Heisenberg’s grandfather had known each other as fellow teachers in Munich. They also belonged to the same hiking club, and Himmler and Heisenberg’s mothers eventually became friendly. So in late July 1937, Mrs. Heisenberg paid a call on Mrs. Himmler, and dropped off a letter that her son had penned in his defense. Mrs. Himmler didn’t want to bother her little Heinrich at work, but Mrs. Heisenberg talked her around. “Oh, we mothers know nothing about politics,” she said with a laugh. “But we know that we have to care for our boys. That’s why I’ve come to you.” This persuaded Mrs. Himmler, who agreed to pass the letter on.
Months passed before Himmler responded. Having no integrity himself, he assumed that Heisenberg was simply agitating for a better job, and tried to buy him off with a professorship in Vienna. To Himmler’s bafflement, Heisenberg refused. There’s something rotten in German physics, he insisted, and someone needs to stand up for what’s right. Himmler shrugged—scientists were such kooks—and agreed to open an investigation.
Heisenberg was thrilled. But his wife Elisabeth, who was less naïve, blanched when she found out. Why in God’s name would you invite such scrutiny? she asked. They’re going to pry into every nook of our lives. She was right. The man in charge of the investigation—Reinhard Heydrich, one of the slimiest Nazis of all, a major architect of the Holocaust—immediately planted spies in Heisenberg’s classes and bugged his telephone. He also dragged the physicist in for long interrogations in dimly lit rooms, digging for dirt far beyond the scope of any scientific dispute. These sessions terrified Elisabeth, who knew that one misstep, one misunderstood word, could land their whole family in a concentration camp. Still, with his scientific honor at stake, Heisenberg willingly endured the hardship.
Hearing that Himmler had opened an investigation into Heis
enberg of course emboldened others to keep attacking him. Some accused him of being a sexual predator or, the ultimate slur, a closet homosexual. The scandal soon became front-page news, and Heisenberg became what the Germans called “hot cobblestones”—someone so controversial that no one wanted to touch him. He began having nightmares in which Nazi troops barged into his bedroom to arrest him.
At last, a full year after the initial appeal, Himmler cleared Heisenberg in a letter, signing it with his signature green pencil. In short, the SS determined that Heisenberg was an apolitical savant and therefore not worth attacking. Heisenberg was ecstatic with the ruling, and the public broadsides ceased.
But it proved a Pyrrhic victory. At its core, the dispute with Lenard and Stark was a dispute over the future of physics, and by appealing to the Nazis to settle it, Heisenberg had legitimized their authority—as if Himmler alone had the wisdom to resolve scientific matters. Worse, although the SS gave Heisenberg its blessing to continue teaching relativity and quantum mechanics, they forbade him from mentioning the names of any Jews who’d helped develop the theories. (Imagine teaching relativity without Einstein!) Shamefully, Heisenberg agreed to this restriction, telling himself that the ideas, not the names, were the important thing. Having compromised once, though, it became easier to do so again later.
Even after this crisis passed, things remained tense for Heisenberg. Like most young men in Germany, he belonged to a paramilitary group, which he actually found invigorating. (He loved shooting machine guns, and once quipped that army service was merely “mountaineering, complicated by the presence of sergeants.” The man was essentially a boy scout with a hypertrophied brain.) But in September 1938 war almost broke out in Europe after Germany seized part of Czechoslovakia. Relishing a fight, Germany began mobilizing its forces, and Heisenberg very nearly had to march off to the front. Only the compromises of Neville “Peace for Our Time” Chamberlain, the British prime minister, saved him from almost-certain death.
