Three Quotes by Werner Heisenberg and Musings
“If the lecture is good, then everything is too smooth. That’s the same in music: if the performance is too good, you really don’t enjoy it, because it just goes by, and you can never penetrate into the heart of it. Sometimes a poor performance is better for enjoyment, because you can look at those things that were wrong and analyze them.”
I’ve attended countless physics lectures and I’ve never, until this moment, heard anyone companied about a lesson that was too good or express a desire for a more haphazard delivery.
“Our house was destroyed in 1943, and I moved the family to a cottage I owned before the war in the Bavarian Alps. This cottage was meant for a very few people, and at the end of the war, there were about 13 people in this very small house.”
There were worse places to spend the war. But if Heisenberg considered living in a vacation cabin in the Bavarian Alps to be a hardship he had no one to blame but himself. By age 31 he was Nobel Laureate and, aside from Einstein, considered to be the greatest physicist alive. Heisenberg could’ve written his own ticket. Any University would’ve been thrilled to have him. He could have come to Stanford and lived in Palo Alto. But instead he remained in Germany for the duration of the war. He never even tried to get out. Why? Although Heisenberg never bought into Nazism he didn’t seem to grasp just how vile their ideology was. He wasn’t willing to live under communism but didn’t object to living under Hitler.
“For Germany, the war was like an end game in chess in which she possessed one castle less than her adversary. The loss of the war was as certain as the loss of an end game under these conditions.”
To equate World War 2 to a handicapped game of chess where Germany had a material disadvantage is wrong. The conflict was not morally neutral and to liken it to a board game is to display a basic lack of understanding. Germany lost the war because she deserved to lose.
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