Trechos de The Dilemmas Of An Upright Man: Max Planck And The Fortunes Of German Science (1987), de J.L. Heilbron.
In his memorandum to the kaiser proposing the foundation of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, [Adolf von] Harnack had emphasized that fundamental research was necessary to industrial advance and that "military power and science are the twin pillars of Germany's greatness." The Prussian finance minister could not make out how the particular science of pure physics, in an institute headed by Einstein, would assist the state in either an industrial or a shooting war; and he was undoubtedly not encouraged by the projectors reference to the scholarly Monumenta Germaniae Historica, a series on German medieval history, as an indication of the sort and level of support they desired. The outbreak of war forced a pause in the fight of pure science for state support before Planck and his colleagues could outflank the minister.
- - -
Planck rejoiced in the patriotic surge of the fall of 1914. Although the father of two boys of military age and the rector of a university emptied by the call to the colors, he welcomed the sacrifice of self to the state as a most desirable unification of purpose and a consolidation of the national will. In this he was at one with his colleagues. As Harnack put it, the war brought "one will, one force, a holy seriousness of purpose"; it raised the individual "above common egoism, the egoism of parties, and all false goods and pseudo-ideals of a moral, aesthetic, and intellectual character"; it directed the "holy flame of the fatherland" against "everything selfish, petty, and common".
The enthusiasm of these first weeks, together with the firm conviction that Germany was engaged in a defensive war against unscrupulous opponents, carried Planck to a step that he soon regretted bitterly. He signed the "Appeal to the Cultured Peoples of the World" ("An die Kulturwelt! Ein Aufruf"), otherwise known as the "Appeal of the Ninety-three Intellectuals." This proclamation, issued on 4 October 1914 in all the principal German newspapers and in ten languages, declared the leaders of German art and science to be at one with the German army and repudiated the charges of the Entente powers that German forces had committed atrocities in Belgium. Drafted by Ludwig Fulda, a playwright who had been concerned with propagating German culture abroad, and polished by the mayor of Berlin, it traded on resistance to the expressed policy of the British to separate the German people from Prussian militarism and on the need widely felt in Germany to expose the "lies" of the Entente powers to the neutral states. Responding to these imperatives, many people, including Planck, signed the Appeal before they had had a chance to read it, on the strength of the reputations of the other signatories, who had lent their names on the same basis.
Most irritating to these hasty intellectuals - more irritating even than the accusation of brutality - was the slander, as they saw it, that their troops had willfully and unnecessarily destroyed treasures of art and science. A country that had given birth to a Beethoven and a Goethe, they said in a grand non sequitur, knew how to respect the cultural heritage of Europe. The professors could not believe that their troops, led by boys they had educated, and commanded by men with whom they themselves had studied, had burned the library of Louvain. The same message was sent west in a proclamation by 3,016 university-level teachers, who pointed to the outstanding value of military service for all peacetime vocations, even the cultivation of science (it inculcates self-sacrifice, the observance of duty, respect for others), and in a declaration by the rectors of twenty-two universities, who pointed to the immunity to hoodlumism acquired in their institutions (they impress nothing so deeply on their students as "attention and wonder before the great creations of the human spirit in art, science, and technology, irrespective of their country or people").
Planck made his new glorification of unity the theme of the business report of his rectoral year. The calling up and enlistment of young men, both students and instructors, had depopulated the University. That was not to be deplored. "The German people has found itself again." No one knew when things would return to normal. That did not matter. "One thing only we know, that we members of our university ... will stand together as one man and hold fast until - despite the slander of our enemies - the entire world comes to recognize the truth and German honor."
- - -
[Hendrik] Lorentz's inner harmony and intellectual cosmopolitanism were sorely tried by the fate of Belgium and the several manifestos from the scientists on either side. He sent Planck accounts of the German occupation, which showed, as Planck put it, that many things had occurred "that do not conduce to the honor of Germans." But the suffering was great, unheard of, on both sides, Planck wrote: his nephew, a physicist, the only son of his brother, had been killed, his own son Erwin had been taken prisoner, both sons of Nernst had perished in battle. "Where is the compensation for all this unspeakable suffering?" Planck could find it only in the spirit of the first weeks of the war. "Could it really be such a terrible thing that has called forth so willing a sacrifice, so pious an enthusiasm? I cannot believe it." During 1915 they exchanged visits, Lorentz to Berlin and Planck to Leyden, to review the claims and counterclaims. Planck brought Lorentz to see some things from the German point of view. Lorentz brought Planck to a courageous, public, quasi-repudiation of the Appeal of 1914.
Already in March of 1915 Planck was apologizing in private for the manifesto. He had signed it only, he told Lorentz, out of a conviction that Germany was fighting a war for its existence and had to stand, and be seen to stand, united. That was all the signing meant, at least to Planck and Harnack; having declared their solidarity with their countrymen, they could turn away from the home front and try to reach an understanding with their enemies. "In my opinion, scientists [now] face no more urgent or finer a challenge than to do their best quietly to counter the continuing poisoning of [the minds] of fighting men and the deepening of hatred among peoples."
Planck had tried to put this policy into practice. He adhered to the Kulturbund deutscher Gelehrter und Künster (Cultural Association of German Scholars and Artists), chaired by his fellow secretary Wilhelm Waldeyer. Its purpose, as Planck set it out for Svante Arrhenius a month after the appearance of the Appeal, was "the support of all efforts aimed at bringing out the truth." The Association was preparing for peace, when old scholars would have their turn at the front, helping to restore old ties. "We consider it our obligation to help in carefully cultivating what remains of international good will and to oppose as far as possible every cheapening and poisoning of public opinion by impassioned libel and slander." Unhappily the Association, which was promoted by the organizers of the Appeal of the Ninety-three Intellectuals, could not find the truth, let alone declare it; nor could it long retain the highly prized unity that accompanied and sanctified mobilization. The purpose of Planck's explanations to Arrhenius was to counter a highly political and pro-German statement made to a Swedish reporter by Ostwald, formerly the head of the pacifist Deutscher Monistenbund, who claimed to be speaking for the Association.
Speaking for himself before the Academy in July 1915, and also for other "good Germans" who wanted nothing from the war but the defense of German honor and the restoration of international relations, Planck hinted that the Reich might bear some blame for the war. In entertaining this possibility he diverged not only from Ostwald and Wien but also from the more moderate Sommerfeld, with whom he usually agreed about lesser matters like the nature of physics. Working down as usual from a great height, Planck observed that since science outlasts all earthly things and events, the war would in the end be the subject of objective research and that it was as unlikely that one side would come out all black and the other all white as that science should arrive at ultimate truth.
Planck made his moderation more widely known early in 1916, in the form of an open letter to Lorentz. On Lorentz's advice, he softened the defensive portion of his draft statement to refer to the special circumstances of the first weeks of the war, to drop a countercharge of slander, and to allow for the possibility that Germany might bear some responsibility for the fighting. But the fine, final lines that place some intellectual and moral values above identification with country are as Planck first wrote them.
- - -
"[...] above all, the defense of the German army against the bitter accusations raised against it, and an emphatic affirmation that German scientists and artists would not separate their cause from the cause of the German army. The German army is nothing other than the German people in arms, and, like people of all callings, scientists and artists are inseparably bound to it.
That we do not defend the behavior of every German, either in peace or in war, I will not stress, although I hold it to be just as self-evident as the fact that we do not now possess a definite scientific answer to the great questions of the historical present. Only a later, fully objective investigation, whose results we can look forward to with a clear conscience, can decide where the responsibility ultimately lies for the failure of the peace initiatives and for all the resulting human suffering.
As long as this war lasts we Germans have only one task, to serve the nation with all our strength."
- - -
Planck asked Lorentz to send copies of the printed letter [...]; Oliver Lodge, [...] and J. J. Thomson in England; Boris Golitsyn in Russia; Pierre Duhem in France; Vito Volterra in Italy.
- - -
The initial public response in the Entente countries was not favorable. In an incoherent but representative comment, the editor of the news magazine of British astronomy The Observatory, which printed an English translation of Planck's letter, observed that it did not cancel the identification of the signataries with the acts of the German army, "so they accept responsibility for the sinking of the Lusitania."
- - -
AGAINST FATE
He [Planck] could not take a step or sign a proclamation demanding the removal of the kaiser, as the League did publicly after its official reappearance in August 1918, although he recognized that abdication was the precondition to securing the reforms he believed necessary to the salvation of the state. He expressed his dilemma in a confidential letter to Einstein.
- - -
Two days after Planck had thus expressed his political philosophy, the Reichstag declared a parliamentary government. During the next week, the sailors mutinied in Kiel; by 7 November the revolution they had started had spread to Hamburg and Bremen; workers and soldiers' soviets appeared throughout Germany; on 9 November a general strike began in Berlin, and the kaiser abdicated without Planck's help. His act freed his liegeman's conscience. Planck gave his support to a new political party, the moderate-right Deutsche Volkspartei, which was preferred by many academics and industrialists. It promised to work within the new political order for economic and social reform.
The breakup of Planck's external world coincided with a personal tragedy of Job-like proportions. Only one of his four children, his younger son Erwin, who had been a prisoner in France, long survived the war. The elder son, Karl, who had had no purpose, died of wounds suffered in action. Karl's sacrifice hit Planck hard. It was not the death itself; as he wrote Lorentz, "everyone should be happy and proud to be able to sacrifice something for the whole." Nor was it that the blow that had struck so many of his friends with sons of military age had come to him, although he now knew their pain. "The suffering that war brings really hurts only when one feels it in his own body." The grief lay in the discovery that he had undervalued his son. Before the war, when Karl drifted, unable to settle into one of the high professions available to and expected of him, his life did not seem to precious to his father to its end showed it to be. The call to the colors had ennobled Karl. In words that might stand as an epitaph to the European civilization then destroying itself, Planck wrote: "Without the war I would never have known his value, and now that I know it, I must lose him."
In 1917 Planck's daughter Grete, who had married a professor in Heidelberg, Ferdinand Fehling, died suddenly, a week after childbirth. Her twin, Emma, came to care for the infant, and in January 1919 she married the widower. By the year's end Emma too was dead after bringing a new life into the world. Her distracted father placed the ashes in the Grunewald cemetery, next to her sister's.
Mais:
http://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxwrrqPyqsnITHA2bUtaOXQ3ZjQ
Niels Bohr
Ernst Mach
In his memorandum to the kaiser proposing the foundation of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, [Adolf von] Harnack had emphasized that fundamental research was necessary to industrial advance and that "military power and science are the twin pillars of Germany's greatness." The Prussian finance minister could not make out how the particular science of pure physics, in an institute headed by Einstein, would assist the state in either an industrial or a shooting war; and he was undoubtedly not encouraged by the projectors reference to the scholarly Monumenta Germaniae Historica, a series on German medieval history, as an indication of the sort and level of support they desired. The outbreak of war forced a pause in the fight of pure science for state support before Planck and his colleagues could outflank the minister.
- - -
Planck rejoiced in the patriotic surge of the fall of 1914. Although the father of two boys of military age and the rector of a university emptied by the call to the colors, he welcomed the sacrifice of self to the state as a most desirable unification of purpose and a consolidation of the national will. In this he was at one with his colleagues. As Harnack put it, the war brought "one will, one force, a holy seriousness of purpose"; it raised the individual "above common egoism, the egoism of parties, and all false goods and pseudo-ideals of a moral, aesthetic, and intellectual character"; it directed the "holy flame of the fatherland" against "everything selfish, petty, and common".
The enthusiasm of these first weeks, together with the firm conviction that Germany was engaged in a defensive war against unscrupulous opponents, carried Planck to a step that he soon regretted bitterly. He signed the "Appeal to the Cultured Peoples of the World" ("An die Kulturwelt! Ein Aufruf"), otherwise known as the "Appeal of the Ninety-three Intellectuals." This proclamation, issued on 4 October 1914 in all the principal German newspapers and in ten languages, declared the leaders of German art and science to be at one with the German army and repudiated the charges of the Entente powers that German forces had committed atrocities in Belgium. Drafted by Ludwig Fulda, a playwright who had been concerned with propagating German culture abroad, and polished by the mayor of Berlin, it traded on resistance to the expressed policy of the British to separate the German people from Prussian militarism and on the need widely felt in Germany to expose the "lies" of the Entente powers to the neutral states. Responding to these imperatives, many people, including Planck, signed the Appeal before they had had a chance to read it, on the strength of the reputations of the other signatories, who had lent their names on the same basis.
Most irritating to these hasty intellectuals - more irritating even than the accusation of brutality - was the slander, as they saw it, that their troops had willfully and unnecessarily destroyed treasures of art and science. A country that had given birth to a Beethoven and a Goethe, they said in a grand non sequitur, knew how to respect the cultural heritage of Europe. The professors could not believe that their troops, led by boys they had educated, and commanded by men with whom they themselves had studied, had burned the library of Louvain. The same message was sent west in a proclamation by 3,016 university-level teachers, who pointed to the outstanding value of military service for all peacetime vocations, even the cultivation of science (it inculcates self-sacrifice, the observance of duty, respect for others), and in a declaration by the rectors of twenty-two universities, who pointed to the immunity to hoodlumism acquired in their institutions (they impress nothing so deeply on their students as "attention and wonder before the great creations of the human spirit in art, science, and technology, irrespective of their country or people").
Planck made his new glorification of unity the theme of the business report of his rectoral year. The calling up and enlistment of young men, both students and instructors, had depopulated the University. That was not to be deplored. "The German people has found itself again." No one knew when things would return to normal. That did not matter. "One thing only we know, that we members of our university ... will stand together as one man and hold fast until - despite the slander of our enemies - the entire world comes to recognize the truth and German honor."
- - -
[Hendrik] Lorentz's inner harmony and intellectual cosmopolitanism were sorely tried by the fate of Belgium and the several manifestos from the scientists on either side. He sent Planck accounts of the German occupation, which showed, as Planck put it, that many things had occurred "that do not conduce to the honor of Germans." But the suffering was great, unheard of, on both sides, Planck wrote: his nephew, a physicist, the only son of his brother, had been killed, his own son Erwin had been taken prisoner, both sons of Nernst had perished in battle. "Where is the compensation for all this unspeakable suffering?" Planck could find it only in the spirit of the first weeks of the war. "Could it really be such a terrible thing that has called forth so willing a sacrifice, so pious an enthusiasm? I cannot believe it." During 1915 they exchanged visits, Lorentz to Berlin and Planck to Leyden, to review the claims and counterclaims. Planck brought Lorentz to see some things from the German point of view. Lorentz brought Planck to a courageous, public, quasi-repudiation of the Appeal of 1914.
Already in March of 1915 Planck was apologizing in private for the manifesto. He had signed it only, he told Lorentz, out of a conviction that Germany was fighting a war for its existence and had to stand, and be seen to stand, united. That was all the signing meant, at least to Planck and Harnack; having declared their solidarity with their countrymen, they could turn away from the home front and try to reach an understanding with their enemies. "In my opinion, scientists [now] face no more urgent or finer a challenge than to do their best quietly to counter the continuing poisoning of [the minds] of fighting men and the deepening of hatred among peoples."
Planck had tried to put this policy into practice. He adhered to the Kulturbund deutscher Gelehrter und Künster (Cultural Association of German Scholars and Artists), chaired by his fellow secretary Wilhelm Waldeyer. Its purpose, as Planck set it out for Svante Arrhenius a month after the appearance of the Appeal, was "the support of all efforts aimed at bringing out the truth." The Association was preparing for peace, when old scholars would have their turn at the front, helping to restore old ties. "We consider it our obligation to help in carefully cultivating what remains of international good will and to oppose as far as possible every cheapening and poisoning of public opinion by impassioned libel and slander." Unhappily the Association, which was promoted by the organizers of the Appeal of the Ninety-three Intellectuals, could not find the truth, let alone declare it; nor could it long retain the highly prized unity that accompanied and sanctified mobilization. The purpose of Planck's explanations to Arrhenius was to counter a highly political and pro-German statement made to a Swedish reporter by Ostwald, formerly the head of the pacifist Deutscher Monistenbund, who claimed to be speaking for the Association.
Speaking for himself before the Academy in July 1915, and also for other "good Germans" who wanted nothing from the war but the defense of German honor and the restoration of international relations, Planck hinted that the Reich might bear some blame for the war. In entertaining this possibility he diverged not only from Ostwald and Wien but also from the more moderate Sommerfeld, with whom he usually agreed about lesser matters like the nature of physics. Working down as usual from a great height, Planck observed that since science outlasts all earthly things and events, the war would in the end be the subject of objective research and that it was as unlikely that one side would come out all black and the other all white as that science should arrive at ultimate truth.
Planck made his moderation more widely known early in 1916, in the form of an open letter to Lorentz. On Lorentz's advice, he softened the defensive portion of his draft statement to refer to the special circumstances of the first weeks of the war, to drop a countercharge of slander, and to allow for the possibility that Germany might bear some responsibility for the fighting. But the fine, final lines that place some intellectual and moral values above identification with country are as Planck first wrote them.
- - -
"[...] above all, the defense of the German army against the bitter accusations raised against it, and an emphatic affirmation that German scientists and artists would not separate their cause from the cause of the German army. The German army is nothing other than the German people in arms, and, like people of all callings, scientists and artists are inseparably bound to it.
That we do not defend the behavior of every German, either in peace or in war, I will not stress, although I hold it to be just as self-evident as the fact that we do not now possess a definite scientific answer to the great questions of the historical present. Only a later, fully objective investigation, whose results we can look forward to with a clear conscience, can decide where the responsibility ultimately lies for the failure of the peace initiatives and for all the resulting human suffering.
As long as this war lasts we Germans have only one task, to serve the nation with all our strength."
- - -
Planck asked Lorentz to send copies of the printed letter [...]; Oliver Lodge, [...] and J. J. Thomson in England; Boris Golitsyn in Russia; Pierre Duhem in France; Vito Volterra in Italy.
- - -
The initial public response in the Entente countries was not favorable. In an incoherent but representative comment, the editor of the news magazine of British astronomy The Observatory, which printed an English translation of Planck's letter, observed that it did not cancel the identification of the signataries with the acts of the German army, "so they accept responsibility for the sinking of the Lusitania."
- - -
AGAINST FATE
He [Planck] could not take a step or sign a proclamation demanding the removal of the kaiser, as the League did publicly after its official reappearance in August 1918, although he recognized that abdication was the precondition to securing the reforms he believed necessary to the salvation of the state. He expressed his dilemma in a confidential letter to Einstein.
- - -
Two days after Planck had thus expressed his political philosophy, the Reichstag declared a parliamentary government. During the next week, the sailors mutinied in Kiel; by 7 November the revolution they had started had spread to Hamburg and Bremen; workers and soldiers' soviets appeared throughout Germany; on 9 November a general strike began in Berlin, and the kaiser abdicated without Planck's help. His act freed his liegeman's conscience. Planck gave his support to a new political party, the moderate-right Deutsche Volkspartei, which was preferred by many academics and industrialists. It promised to work within the new political order for economic and social reform.
The breakup of Planck's external world coincided with a personal tragedy of Job-like proportions. Only one of his four children, his younger son Erwin, who had been a prisoner in France, long survived the war. The elder son, Karl, who had had no purpose, died of wounds suffered in action. Karl's sacrifice hit Planck hard. It was not the death itself; as he wrote Lorentz, "everyone should be happy and proud to be able to sacrifice something for the whole." Nor was it that the blow that had struck so many of his friends with sons of military age had come to him, although he now knew their pain. "The suffering that war brings really hurts only when one feels it in his own body." The grief lay in the discovery that he had undervalued his son. Before the war, when Karl drifted, unable to settle into one of the high professions available to and expected of him, his life did not seem to precious to his father to its end showed it to be. The call to the colors had ennobled Karl. In words that might stand as an epitaph to the European civilization then destroying itself, Planck wrote: "Without the war I would never have known his value, and now that I know it, I must lose him."
In 1917 Planck's daughter Grete, who had married a professor in Heidelberg, Ferdinand Fehling, died suddenly, a week after childbirth. Her twin, Emma, came to care for the infant, and in January 1919 she married the widower. By the year's end Emma too was dead after bringing a new life into the world. Her distracted father placed the ashes in the Grunewald cemetery, next to her sister's.
Mais:
http://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxwrrqPyqsnITHA2bUtaOXQ3ZjQ
Niels Bohr
Ernst Mach
