Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics under Hitler - Tapa blanda

"Ball's book shows what can happen to morality when cleverness and discovery are valued above all else" (Philip Maughan New Statesman)

"Ball does an outstanding service by reminding us how powerful and sometimes confusing the pressures were... Packed with dramatic, moving and even comical moments" (Robert P Crease Nature)

"A fascinating account of the moral dilemmas faced by German physicists working within Nazism. Impeccably researched" (Ian Thomson Tablet)

"An engrossing and disturbing book" (Andrew Robinson History Today)

"[A] fine book" (Christopher Coker Times Literary Supplement)

Serving the Reich tells the story of physics under Hitler. While some scientists tried to create an Aryan physics that excluded any ‘Jewish ideas’, many others made compromises and concessions as they continued to work under the Nazi regime. Among them were world-renowned physicists Max Planck, Peter Debye and Werner Heisenberg.

After the war most scientists in Germany maintained they had been apolitical or even resisted the regime: Debye claimed that he had gone to America in 1940 to escape Nazi interference in his research; Heisenberg and others argued that they had deliberately delayed production of the atomic bomb.

In a gripping exploration of moral choices under a totalitarian regime, here are human dilemmas, failures to take responsibility and three lives caught between the idealistic goals of science and a tyrannical ideology.