Science and silence in the time of Hitler

Talk is cheap. That's why there's no shortage of it. But to speak out for the right and decent thing in circumstances where your career, or even more, is on the line, requires courage, a much rarer commodity.

Scientists as a group are no more generously endowed with moral courage than any other. A relatively recent book on the life of a founding figure in quantum theory, probably the most important concept in 20century physics, illustrates the difficulties scientists can face in this area. The scientist in question is Erwin Schrodinger, and the book is Schrodinger: Life and Thought by Walter Moore (Cambridge University Press, 1992).

Schrodinger was born in Vienna in 1887. From early, he was a brilliant pupil. He entered the University of Vienna in 1906 and took his degree in physics in 1910, after which he was appointed an assistant in physics at the university.

He served in the army for a few years and returned to the university to teach physics. Schrodinger did not produce his famous work until relatively late in his career, 1926, when he was aged 38 and employed as professor of physics at the University of Zurich.

Schrodinger's principal contribution to physics, in recognition of which he shared the Nobel Prize in 1933, with Werner Heisenberg and Paul Dirac, was the development, in 1926, of wave mechanics. It had been known for some time that the basic nature of light could be explained both in terms of particles or waves. It was further known that small particles moving at high velocities also display properties of waves.

But it wasn't known what forces influenced the waves; what shapes the waves have and how they propagate in time. The equation developed by Schrodinger explained this.

Some 10 years earlier, Nils Bohr had proposed a model of the atom in which electrons move around the central nucleus in certain prescribed orbits. This model, sometimes called the planetary model because of its similarity of organisation to the solar system, accounted for the properties of light emitted by hydrogen, but it lacked an underlying theory. Schrodinger's equation supplied this.

An analogy with the history of our understanding of the solar system helps to explain the value of Schrodinger's equation. At the time of the astronomer Kepler, it was known that the sun sits at the centre of the solar system and that the planets revolve about the sun in elliptical orbits. But there was no underlying theory as to why this had to be so. This explanatory theory arrived later when Newton developed his laws of motion and gravitational attraction. What Newton's laws did to explain the solar system, Schrodinger's equation did to explain the atom.

Schrodinger's equation also explains chemical bonding, the nature of the atomic nucleus, the generation of energy in stars etc. It has probably had more to do with the development of 20-century science and technology than any other discovery in physics. Schrodinger was a genius.

After publication of his monumental work, Schrodinger, he became a celebrity. In 1927 he became professor of theoretical physics at the University of Berlin, where Einstein also taught.

Schrodinger always claimed he was above politics. But, of course, he lived at a time and in a place where this was impossible and the bulk of the evidence is that he always took careful note of the political conditions and trimmed his sails.

In 1933 Einstein emigrated to the United States, where he remained for the rest of his life. In that same year, all Jewish professors were dismissed from German universities. Einstein resigned from the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Bernhard Rust, the Minister of Science, pressured the academy members into publishing a statement to say they were glad Einstein had left. Max von Laue called an academy meeting to get the statement withdrawn. Fourteen out of 70 members attended. Only two backed Laue.

Schrodinger did not attend the academy meeting, nor did he make any public protest about the treatment of Einstein. He did make private remarks about his displeasure with the Nazis. There is also a story that he once intervened and remonstrated with Nazi storm-troopers who were beating Jews on the street, but the incident is out of character with the rest of his behaviour throughout this period, and may never have happened.

In 1933 Schrodinger moved to Oxford University, where he worked until 1936 when he returned to Austria, to a professorship at Graz. This was, apparently a career move, motivated by the promise of a substantial academic pension at Graz.

It was clear at the time Austria was about to form an alliance with Germany, the Anschluss. After this, Nazism bloomed in Austria. The new Nazi rector at Graz advised Schrodinger to write to the university senate to demonstrate that he entertained no doubts about the new regime. Schrodinger wrote a cringing letter expressing enthusiastic support for the Nazis, which was published in all the German and Austrian newspapers under the heading "Confessions to the Fuhrer".

Despite his public pronouncement, Schrodinger was privately disgusted with the political situation. In 1939 he availed of Eamon de Valera's offer to come to Dublin as the first Director of the School of Theoretical Physics in the newly established Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. He remained in that post for 17 years. He returned in 1956 to a university position in Vienna. He died in 1961.

Schrodinger's most significant work in Dublin was to deliver a magnificent series of lectures, which later became books. The most influential of these books was entitled What is Life? It is a brilliantly written and delightfully lucid book, and it inspired a generation of young physicists, for example Francis Crick (who, with James Watson, solved the structure of DNA) to go into biology and to develop molecular biology.

Why did Schrodinger and so many of his academic colleagues in Germany decide to keep their heads down during the Nazi era? There were some notable exceptions, but, by and large, the academic community did not take a bold stand. The reason for this was fear.

The least that one might expect for speaking out would be the ruining of one's career. Speak out consistently and you would probably lose more than your career.

It would be too easy for me to sit here in my armchair and condemn people who found themselves in that horrible position. Nevertheless, it has to be disappointing that more was not done. I will return to this topic.

William Reville is a senior lecturer in biochemistry at UCC