Heisenberg and the German Bomb
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 8 ก.ย. 2024
- Operation Epsilon: Heisenberg and the German Bomb. Farm Hall transcripts. German Uranium Project
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Videos mentioned:
Critical Mass: when the atomic bomb got real • Critical Mass: when th...
Physics of a Nuclear Explosion • Physics of a nuclear e...
Series on Nuclear Weapons Physics • Physics of Nuclear Wea...
Papers:
- The History of ‘Hitler's Atomic Bomb’ needs to be corrected, M. Popp (2015) - onlinelibrary....
- Why Hitler Did Not Have Atomic Bombs, M. Popp (2021) www.mdpi.com/2...
- The Peculiarities of the German Uranium Project, M. Popp & de Klerk (2023) www.mdpi.com/2...
Special thanks to:
- The Hoover Institution Archives for kindly allowing the use of the Alsos Mission Films, part of the Boris T. Pash papers
- the American Institute of Physics for permission to access and use the secret documents captured during the Alsos Mission, now part of the Samuel A. Goudsmit papers; and
- Professor Manfred Popp for internal communication and documents.
Affiliate links (may earn a commission)
The Night of the Physicists: Operation Epsilon amzn.to/483wpfZ
The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall amzn.to/41tJ4Gx
Operation Epsilon, The Farm Hall Transcripts amzn.to/472uBCA
Operation Epsilon amzn.to/476PWuD
Brighter Than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists amzn.to/48qrDsz
Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb amzn.to/3tq8BUq
Alsos amzn.to/3RMXz4Z
Credits:
Alsos Mission Films, Boris T. Pash papers, Film reel 1, Hoover Institution Archives • Boris T. Pash papers, ...
Alsos Mission Films, Boris T. Pash papers, Film reel 2, Hoover Institution Archives • Boris T. Pash papers, ...
Alsos Mission Films, Boris T. Pash papers, Film reel 3, Hoover Institution Archives • Boris T. Pash papers, ...
Alsos Mission Films, Boris T. Pash papers, Film reel 4, Hoover Institution Archives • Boris T. Pash papers, ...
Operation Epsilon, National Archives and Records Administration discovery.nati...
A portrait of LTG Leslie R. Groves by U.S. Army, public domain
Alsos team at cache of uranium by AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives
Germany map by Freepik www.freepik.co...
Stern-Gerlach experiment by Theresa Knott under CC BY-SA 3.0 Deed creativecommon...
Alsos members by U.S. Army, public domain
US map by Freepik www.freepik.co...
Quantum projection of S by Theresa Knott under CC BY-SA 3.0
Alsos aircraft by Mickey Thurgood, Samuel A. Goudsmit papers, 1921-1979. Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics (AIP).
Semi-empirical mass formula diagram adapted from Daniel FR under CC BY-SA 3.0 Deed creativecommon...
Farm-Hall by sps1955 under CC BY 2.0 Deed creativecommon...
Tape recorder by Cottonbro Studio on Pexels www.pexels.com...
Typewriter by KoolShooters on Pexels www.pexels.com...
BBC radio microphone by Leif Jørgensen under CC BY-SA 4.0 Deed creativecommon...
Critical mass by Fastfission, public domain
Heidelberg cyclotron, Samuel A. Goudsmit papers, 1921-1979. Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics (AIP).
French cyclotron, Musée des Arts et Métiers, Paris by Edal under CC BY-SA 3.0 Deed creativecommon...
Cyclotron diagram, Samuel A. Goudsmit papers, 1921-1979. Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics (AIP).
Heidelberg cyclotron courtesy of Archives of the Max Planck Society, Berlin
Graphitkugel fuer Hochtemperaturreaktor by Stefan Kühn, public domain
Walther Bothe portrait courtesy of Archives of the Max Planck Society, Berlin
Haigerloch reactor replica by ArtMechanic under CC BY-SA 3.0 Deed creativecommon...
Baseball card of Morris "Moe" Berg by Goudey, public domain
The Catcher Was a Spy poster by Animus Films/PalmStar Media/Serena Films/Windy Hill Productions
Heisenberg papers by Springer Berlin
Kosmische Strahlung cover by Springer Berlin
Particle cascade by Theturnipmaster under CC BY-SA 3.0 Deed creativecommon...
Albert Speer by the German Federal Archive (Deutsches Bundesarchiv) under CC BY-SA 3.0 DE Deed creativecommon...
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In the Forword of Walker‘s book Jungk confessed that Heissenberg and the others tricked on him, and made him believe the story of german scientists not working on the bomb for higher moral reasons. Later Jungk even called them liars. Mark Walker’s book on the german efforts is very recommendable.
It's hard to overstate the extremely high quality of these videos by Dr Jorge. They're as good as any books I've read on this subject yet reduced to 20 minutes of superb content. I've learned so much by watching his series of videos on this subject, and while the math is sometimes a bit beyond me, I understand his conclusions and how he reached them. Fabulous stuff.
thanks for the appreciation of the work that went into making this video: there was a lot of reading, writing, and rewriting plus reaching out to many researchers and official institutions to get formal permission to use the material presented.
You mean “overstate.” Think about it.
@@davidweber5833 Fixed it! Thanks 👍
Agreed unbelievable!
Too bad the audio is so thin. Quiet and low quality. Closed captions save the show.
These videos are great! I'm a German physicist with significant interest in history and while most stuff on this platform is a let down this channel always delivers! It really comes through that you understand how physics research is done when you evaluate and weight the evidence. It's also so refreshing that you clearly understand the physics and want to make that accessible as well. If you're going to stick with the nuclear subject, are you interested in making a video about the famous death toll of Hiroshima question? It's one of those subjects that many people are interested in, but I find most coverage to be lacking in nuance and understanding of the difficult evidentiary base for the relevant radio-biological models.
thanks for the comment, it really makes the effort worth it when people appreciate the work behind each video. As I mentioned in another comment, there is a lot of research behind this 23-min video; and many back-and-forth emails with researchers and official institutions to get formal permission to use the material presented.
@@jkzero Really thank you! So we’ll done I could imagine it took a lot of work. It is really a phenomenal mini documentary
@@goldengoat1737 it was a lot of work but I really enjoyed putting this together, glad to see that it keeps gaining views months after its publication
Excellent suggestion!
Sir, you have one foot in theoetical science, and the other in ordinary conversation. This is extraordinarily important in today's world. Well done. Keep on your path!
thank you for your nice comment, I love telling stories and physics is the only thing I know about so I created this channel. I hope you check the other videos too
this video is in the top one percentile in quality on youtube. well done in every sense.
I am glad you liked the video, thanks for the appreciation; although this is not one of my most popular video, it is the one that most paperwork required. Many of the images and footage shown required weeks of work and dozens of emails to get the appropriate permission of usage.
More like at least top o.oo1%, you have no idea how many hours of trash get uploaded to YT every seconds
I truly love your videos, working through my physics class right now and everything here has motivated me to actually do my homework. Reading A History of the Atomic Bomb as well, and all of your videos just combine those two subjects in a way that scratches the itch I never knew I had. Combine that with the amazing research you do, and I hope you'll keep putting out these videos for as long as you feel able! Probably some of the best on this topic I've ever watched on TH-cam.
wow, serving as motivation for doing homework has never occurred to me but I am glad I can serve as an extra motivation push. Thanks for your comment, it really makes the effort worth it when people appreciate the work behind each video. What physics class are you working on?
I visited the reactor at Haigerloch years ago, it is a fascinating place built into a cliff below a church. Had they been able to fill it with the heavy water moderator they intended to use they might have had some difficulty in approaching it for a while afterwards! There are photographs of British soldiers carrying the cubes of Uranium from the forest where they were hidden, so it was occupied by the British before it became part of the French zone.
What evidence do you have? The reactor vessel at Haigerloch was not the only reactor. The loss of the heavy water supply from Norway was made up. Heavy water was produced in Germany at the Linde Eismaschinen AG in Britz. Two photos of the vessel with American personnel show no one wearing protective clothing. The cubes were suspended on chains at a carefully measured distance from each other. Each cube was natural uranium.
@@user-cy5li2zp9z I don't understand your comment. I described my experience of a visit I made many years ago, what evidence do you want? When you say the loss of heavy water was made up are you saying it was not true, or that they made up for the loss from elsewhere? What was the output of heavy water from Linde Eismachinen? Why were they building reactors if they didn't know about plutonium? Not for making weapons.
The photograph I saw at Haigerloch was of a chain of Tommies carrying the cubes of uranium down out of the woods, I expect it is probably still there, you could go have a look at it, if you do you may find that the reactor there was never completed.
There are plenty of references to the conclusion that Germany had no intention of developing bombs because they were aware of the vast industrial development that would have been needed and they expected, or were led to expect, that the war would soon be over so they didn't need them. In view of the many reactors Fermi had to build before they established the viable designs later used and the vast scale of the various uranium enrichment facilities America built it is most unlikely that under the harsh reality of their war time economy, despite having enslaved most of central and Eastern Europe, Germany would have been able to achieve any meaningful production of sufficiently enriched uranium to be of any use.
@@NichoFilm None of that is true. None of it. It is based on wrong conclusions based on incomplete information. See: Atomversuche in Deutschland by Günter Nagel.
@@user-cy5li2zp9z You will have to do better than that I'm afraid. Given the obsessive nature of scientists, especially nuclear physicists, to share their knowledge the suggestion that wartime Germany managed to separate enough U235 to make and detonate a bomb and then keep all that work secret from their compatriots around the world after the war until they died is ignorant nonsense. The engineering work required to separate significant quantities of U235 in the US for the Manhattan project, and in Britain after the war, was vast, and there is no evidence of this having been built in Germany during the war, while there is ample evidence that they decided not to do it because they did not have the capacity to do so. Many hundreds of thousands of people were involved in the work required for Manhattan in the US at a cost of a couple of billion dollars at the time, what was the total budget of the German Uranium research? Peanuts by comparison. Have Günter Nagel's works been published in English? I suspect not, because they have been so soundly criticised by numerous authors.
With regard to my comments about the reactor at Haigerloch, see the photos of British and American soldiers dismantling the reactor in the transcript of the Farm Hall tapes at doi.org/10.1063%2F1.1292473. I'm sure you will say that these tapes were concocted by the British secret services and are not true but the evidence they gave was never rebutted by the scientists involved after the war. You also might care to consider Hugo Watzlavek's manuscript in the Deutsches Museum, at digital.deutsches-museum.de/de/digital-catalogue/archive-item/FA%20002/752/#1.
There is also a huge bunker complex in the Rhein-Erft district near Cologne.
This bunker complex houses a nuclear power plant from the Nazi era.
This was probably Adolf Hitler's hiding place.
At last an answer to a question that has intrigued me since I heard about German wartime nuclear research from my father--Winfield W. Salisbury, who worked for E. O. Lawrence during the 1930s and had a brief role in the Manhattan Project near the very end--namely, whether Heisenberg, as he liked to claim, had been working toward a bomb but had steered the effort off course to prevent the Nazis from getting one. Thanks for this very interesting episode in your series.
What a great video, the facts and the truth is insane, a lot of people think that the Germans were developing a bomb but the reality is way different, i have to admit even i didnt know about this, what a great history lesson, thanks for the great video keep the great work up!
thank, I am glad the history lesson is appreciated, there is a lot of research behind this 23-mon video; and many back-and-forth emails with researchers and official institutions to get formal permission to use the material presented.
Was away from this channel while on Christmas vacation. So definitely a treat to find two new videos. An excellent discussion of German physicists and the A-Bomb. Very thorough very convincing. The Americans clearly saw the industrial scale that would be required to produce the bomb particularly in purifying uranium and producing plutonium. And the US obviously had the resources required to build the neccesary infrastructure. Thinking about early mistakes and miscalculations on critical mass, America scientists made a lot of similar mistakes early on ( i recall one physicist first calculating critical mass at several tons of U-238. And was shocked when refining it was proposed)But i think the American approach of centralizing research and concentrating scientists would facilitate cooperation and communication--or what used to be called " water cooler talk" provided a much more efficient environment for solving problems.
I am glad you enjoyed the binge-watching session
The United States not only had the necessary infrastructure, or could easily build it, the U.S. was the only country that wasn't being bombed.
Also, it shouldn't be surprising that the Germans spent so much time and effort working on nuclear reactors. The first step in the U.S. bomb research was constructing the reactor in Chicago. That one worked, but given that the Americans decided to try every possible way to make the bomb, if that first reactor hadn't worked the scientists would have moved onto something else until something did work. The Germans, after failing with their first reactor since they were using heavy water, then kept trying also. They just never got anything that worked.
I think it was less to do with resources but more to do with the fact that the US did not have an invasion force of 5 million Germans on their soil.
Germany had the resources but they were in a life and death struggle with the world's largest armed forces.
The USSR had the resources. They also had Igor Kurchatov, their Oppenheimer whose members of his lab kept a track of developments and noticed that all western publications had stopped writing on nuclear fission. Igor brought this to the attention of Stalin.
Stalin wasn't interested in nuclear physics or any longterm project when he had 5 million Nazis hell -bent on exterminating the USSR including , 19 Panzer divisions in 4 Panzer Army Groups, 4 Luftwaffe air fleets , 208 divisions in the world's largest invasion.
Stalin was worried about IL2s, T34s, Katyushas, Yak 3s and other PROVEN immediate weapons to answer the Nazi threat.
Stalin proved to be correct.
But as Oppenheimer and Szilard warned the moment he understood the threat to his country by the US dropping 2 bombs over a Japan trying to negotiate a surrender through Soviet mediation, he had Kurchatov work on the bomb and gave him all the resources he needed.
The rest is history ........
It was not better than what German scientists came up with. In the book Critical Mass, author Carter P. Hydrick shows, using original Manhattan Project documents, that the Americans would not have the required fissile materials to drop two different bombs later in the war. There was no American atomic bomb in March, 1945. There is much more to the story.
@@charlesgantz5865 Not true. Atomic bomb development went much further in Germany.
What a master class! I truely love the high quality of your work.
Thanks for your comment, it really makes the effort worth it when people appreciate the work behind each video.
Great video! Unfortunately, this topic is often only ever dealt with by leaning into one sensationalistic extreme (Heisenberg purposely sabotaged the effort) or the other (Goudsmit and von Schirach). You present a very grounded version of this part of history, and it's the only one that really makes sense when looking at the evidence. Again, well done.
I guess we want to believe that our heroes are really that, at least I believed that being a Heisenberg fan, plus he is my Ururgroßvater. People want to see him has a villain or a hero, but in reality it appears to be that he (and most of the members of the Uranverein) just didn't care enough or found themselves in such a comfort zone that doing the work would just risk it all. I really recommend the paper by Popp and de Klerk.
What? Your accent sounds Swedish, your name sounds Spanish, you live in Germany and Heisenberg was your Greatgreatgrandfather?
How does all of that square up??? 😮
I forgot a quite relevant word in my response above, I meant to say that "Heisenberg is my Ururgroßdoktorvater," minor but significant difference. The PhD advisor of my PhD advisor was student of Rudolf Peierls, who was student of Heisenberg. First time that my accent is classified as Swedish but I am sure Americans spot the Spanish right away. To square everything up: I come originally from Chile, got my Ph.D. in the US, moved to Germany for my postdoc, and stayed after transitioning to industry.
Bro, you don’t sound Spanish to me AT ALL… I could see Skandinavian or maybe Dutch, but not Spanish. Very Interesting.
There was no German bomb. There was no German bomb _project_ to speak of. They did a little basic research into fission and that was it.
That's exactly what the video is about.
@@jkzero It is pure clickbait from start to finish. Starting with the title.
Veery nice! I wish these videos were around when I was in grad school! 🙂 Now I am reading over my old notes on S-matrix theory via the Propagator. I love it! keep them coming.
Glad it was helpful! After I took quantum field theory in grad school, I asked if I could attend the lectures the next year... and then I did it again so technically I had 6 semester of QFT but I still feel that I only scratched its surface, what a fascinating but also brain-melting topic
Wow! 6 semesters! I worked with a gravity group. I only had 2 semesters QFT@@jkzero
Heisenberg did everything he could to keep the project going at the same time he took “sudden left turns” whenever the project got close to any meaningful development. He had absolutely no stomach for the development of an atomic weapon.
The only reason this isn't mainstream is beacuse it's a niche type of content, the whole nuclear stuff, i would recommend tryong to review scientific accuracies on nuclear showcase in series and movies, like the Chernobyl movie and the many ww2 movies out there.
Btw amazing content, extremely well researched
Thanks for the support and recommendation to grow. I believe I have enough original material for now to continue; I have done my best to avoid falling for the easy path of reviewing the material of others. I have noticed this trend in which good channels end up publishing reaction videos to films, memes, and commenting the videos of other youtubers. I really don't want to do that, I will do what I can to continue to grow. Comments, sharing, and liking help supporting the channel.
@@jkzero thanks for the response, it's great that you are focused on doing original comment, hadn't thought about it through this perspective, hoping to see your growth, the quality is otherworldly
@@Embless-id5od again, thanks for the support and happy to have you in the channel
Heisenberg is the bald man who dissolves bodies in acid, very popular
7:18 I've read "The Uranium Club''. Very enlightening.
It is one of my most valuable books, it occupies a special place on my shelf together with Rhodes' "The Making of the Atomic Bomb," Serber's "Los Alamos Primer," and Bethe's "Blast Wave"
There is also a huge bunker complex in the Rhein-Erft district near Cologne.
This bunker complex houses a nuclear power plant from the Nazi era.
This was probably Adolf Hitler's hiding place.
"A physics trained baseball player spy"
Almost as much of a polymath as Dr. Buckaroo Banzai (physicist, neurosurgeon, test pilot, and rock star)
I had to google this name, never heard of it. The film about Moe Berg is quite decent. Knowing the story, I expected much more from such a high-budget film, but it is entertaining: th-cam.com/video/W0XTxOs-_Os/w-d-xo.html
Heisenberg: "We cannot know both the position and the speed of a particle with perfect accuracy."
Banzai: "Wherever you go, there you are."
@@guest6398 Heisenberg to Banzai: "I am not an electron" :)
@@guest6398 "What isn't where it's at? A dog where it wants to be". We had an Afghan Hound that I named Heisenberg, Heisy for short, because we could not know his position and speed with perfect accuracy, he ran so fast, at random.
Hello Dr Diaz, please keep making these videos!-I am hoping you will do an in-depth video on the Plank-Fokker equation and how even the neutron diffusion equation is a version of Plank-Fokker, as is brownian motion and entropy in statistical mechanics-thank you because modern books are all difficult to understand-george
I am glad you liked the videos. I cannot guarantee to be able to fulfill all the requests but I always open to collecting suggestions, thanks.
i’m really glad i’ve stumbled on such a high quality channel, i’ve been struggling to find good small channels due to AI Content Farming making most videos minimal garbage
Thanks, I am glad you liked the content in the channel. As you say, the signal-to-noise ratio is low these times and making this type of videos is a slow and time-consuming process so thanks for appreciating it.
I was told a story by an old "Senior Engineer" from an East Coast Utility at an Electric Power Research Institute governing committee meeting, about 30 years ago. He had been at a conference where Edward Teller spoke. After the evening banquet, this fellow and several other engineers got a chance to talk with Teller, and one of them asked, "How close were the Germans to a Nuclear weapon during WWII. Teller responded by telling about a "just post surrender" meeting he was sent to in Cambridge UK, a "cocktail party" as it would be. There were going to be several "German scientists" there. Teller was "set up" for this. Of course he spoke his native Hungarian, and French, and Italian and English. BUT some people were assigned to come up to him and ask questions in German and he was to respond, "I don't really speak German well.." That was done for deflecting the "German Scientists" from paying attention to Teller. DURING THE COCKTAIL PARTY (obviously the 6th of August, 1945) a man came into the room and announced, "The Americans have dropped an Atomic Weapon on the Japanese." Heisenberg immediately turned to another "German Scientist" and they began discussing the nature of a Uranium (U235) based weapon and a Plutonium based one. It was a very "animated" discussion. Teller reported it back and it gave a great insight to the Manhattan project types. But Teller made it clear to the folks at the conference 30 years later, if HE had discussed publicly the details that Heisenberg and the other German fellow did (in German) he...(presuming English or even Hungarian) would have been arrested shortly thereafter and spent 10 years at Leavenworth prison in the USA! Now I kept this story in my head for years and then I read a book called, "The Strangest Man". by Gram Farmelo. (The biography of Paul Dirac). It turns out that Dirac was at that Cambridge cocktail party, and he was very excited to meet his fellow "quantum mechanics" foundation friend, Heisenberg for the first time in like 9 years! When I read that I KNEW the name of one of the two German Scientists at that party and also knew that the story from Teller was probably completely accurate. (By the way, Teller's conclusion was that the Germans were FAR ENOUGH ALONG that only their lacking a method to enrich uranium - - - the USA used Alfred Neir's mass spec machines to enrich the needed U235...NO Oak Ridge was NOT finished until well after the war! And that the Germans DID NOT HAVE A PURE ENOUGH GRAPHITE to run a Graphite moderated reactor, which the USA did have.. thus there was no practical way to make U235 or Plutonium and the Germans could do no testing with same!
Thanks for another excellent video.
Skilfully produced work. It also raises the question that the fundamental mistake that the brilliant Heisenberg made with the mean free path of the neutron in uranium was deliberate or not? I've read previously about the dilatory effort the Germans were making in fission reactors and making a nuclear bomb, even as they had a lead over other Western European countries and the United States in this research in the late 1930s to early 1940s. But I've not heard of the Farmhall espionage attempt by the British with the German Physicists in 1945-46, although they did this also with German generals they captured during World War 2 at Trent Park. Some valuable information was gathered by both espionage attempts.
Sir! Your channel is pure gold!
Even better, it's pure U235.
Wow, thanks!
I'm very glad I found this series. The way you compile and present your topic is excellent.
Thanks for your kind comment, I am glad you liked the video series. I am always curious to know what brings viewers to the channel, were you searching for something in particular or did the 'mighty algorithm' find you? Also, In case you haven't, make sure to check the running series on quantum physics th-cam.com/play/PL_UV-wQj1lvVxch-RPQIUOHX88eeNGzVH.html
@@jkzero The Algorithm (blessings and peace be upon it) pointed to the first video in this series. I'm pretty regularly searching on History of Science and Technology, I think I recently did a search on the Hanford Site (which I got to visit a few years ago and is amazing), I like looking into Uranium chemistry, and I watch a bunch of PBS Spacetime, which gets deeper than infotainment on quantum physics, but doesn't do the math, which is what interests me. I was a CS major way back in college, so I only formally got through the first two semesters of calc-based physics, so I've got tons left to learn.
While I've got you, can you recommend any sources that go deeper into the U-235 extraction process that happened in Tennessee? Both logistics and theory. Most everything I've watched or read has hand-waved that effort.
@@verdatum Thanks for sharing and I am glad the algorithm is working, I hope you find the other videos of interest too and welcome to the channel. So you got to visit the Hanford Site, I never made it up there, my highlight was an invitation that I got to visit the Theory Group at Los Alamos, it was a dream come true, loved that place.
Regarding your question, I don't know much about the specifics of uranium enrichment at Oak Ridge. There is a book (a booklet really) titled "A Guide to the Manhattan Project in Tennessee" but reviews indicate that it is quite general information, probably not what you are looking for. Have you check the "Smyth Report"? Three of its chapters are dedicated to the uranium enrichment efforts at Oak Ridge.
@@jkzero I'll check, thank you!
One new info that I got from your videos so far is that these early nuclear pioneers seem to underestimate the viability of Uranium enrichment. Interesting...
Locked up the pitchblend mining market. Biggest Allied sweat.
I was surprised that you did not mention Heisenberg's visit to Bohr, dramatized in Frayn's play 'Copenhagen'.
The original plan was to have a dedicated video about the uncertain Copenhagen meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg.
Great work, Dr good logical explanation i love it. God bless you with more wisdom and knowledge
Glad it was helpful! Make sure to check the rest of the playlist on the physics of nuclear weapons.
Absolutely fascinating! thank you.
"... to keep the (nuclear scientists) away from the soviets and the French". Especially the French. When Heisenberg became interested, he solved the problem in a few days. I reached my level of incompetence at the undergraduate Maths level, I am in awe of folks that can do real Maths.
Subscribed! This videos is so well done has all the information you want and none of what you don’t! To be honest it’s so good I wouldn’t mind if it was an hour long. But I love your practical view point seems like you really just want to know the truth and aren’t trying to prove what you already thought
Thank you so much for your nice comment; I am glad that you find the content of value. I have attempted to create content beyond what I have seen out there and I appreciate that viewers have noticed the efforts behind. Thanks for watching, subscribing, and welcome to the channel.Currently I am running a video series on the development of quantum mechanics that can check out as a full playlist.
This question has been debated over and over since the war, but I think the secret recordings make it clear their effort was not about making a bomb but a power generating reactor. That Heisenberg thought more than 10T was needed meant he had not worked out the critical mass and the fact that once aware of the bomb was able to calculate the CM in just a few days must have been embarrassing that he'd missed this. I have to believe that the expectation that 100,000 Calutrons would be needed ended any pursuit right then and there as that was not even remotely possible in war time Germany given Allied bombing and the extraordinary cost of such a factory. Indeed, the fact that they did not believe the bomb had been used and that, instead, some vast conventional bomb must have been used makes it clear they could not imagine it possible. They were not alone, even Einstein thought it impossible...
you are totally right, in fact, on the famous Einstein-Szilard letter to President Roosevelt they describe the delivery of the bomb by ship, which shows that the idea of a gigantic bomb was in their minds
Thank you, very informative, and well done.
I am glad you liked it, make sure to check the other videos in this series or in the currently running video series on quantum physics
A cogent yet concise explanation of that history which a layperson like myself could follow. Thanks for keeping it so straightforward .
I had naively thought that the Nazi regime posed a nuclear threat until the allied attack on the heavy water plant and ferry sinking.
The story of the attack to the Norwegian heavy-water plant has been glorified by Hollywood as the sabotage that blocked the Germans from building the bomb, which far from reality. The sad part is that the attack to the Norwegian ferry was unnecessary. There is a great documentary about retrieving the barrels with heavy water on PBS Nova, highly recommended despite the incorrect narrative of the sabotage mission being the reason that prevented the German from building the bomb th-cam.com/video/e550d2jlY8k/w-d-xo.html
@@jkzero Hi! Try to search for Dr. Todd Rider or Rider Institute. He claims the germans in WW2 tested nuclear bombs 2-3 times succesfully and had up to 10 bombs ready at the end of the war. On the institute webpage point Revolutionary Innovation you find the documents he researched.
I have heard a number of times that the Allies were upset with the likelihood of Germany making an A-bomb. The recent movie, 'Oppenheimer' relates that worry and there's been a number of TV doc over the years that also express this concern. The practical difference was Plutonium. If memory servers, McMillan and Seaborg figuring out the initial first few steps, which almost never happened at all... McMillan, while at Berkley, was trying to determine the relative weights of a series of heavy nuclei using the radiation source of the University's cyclotron, and stumbled across something he wasn't expecting. Uncle volunteered him to do some hush-hush work on the US' east coast a few weeks later. Seaborg, having heard the University gossip wrote McMillan if the two could collaborate where Seaborg would try to figure out the practical chemistry side. McMillan agreed and all else is history. There was a PBS series a few years back about the elements and how the efforts of various folks for nearly a century or more tried to understand what was going on.
Thanks!
Thanks so much for your generous support
The presentation is quite good, but there's a lot more that could be said about it. Today we know things in detail, everything has already been dealt with in books such as (German titles) the reference analysis "Die Uranmaschine", J. Walker or "Werner Heisenberg", D.C. Cassady and "Heller als tausend Sonnen", R. Jungk.
Heisenberg (together with C.F. Weiszäcker) never worked on a bomb. He didn't want that and presented the development of the bomb within a period of 2 years (which was military required at that time) as unfeasible under war conditions. He suggested working towards a reactor first. He said this again and again, also in a personal conversation with A. Speer. But he probably didn't do this less for moral reasons, but because it was too risky for him to work on a weapon that could become decisive in the war. Failure would have been dangerous for everyone involved in Hitler's regime. He was an opponent of Hitler, viewed the Nazis as a misfortune for Germany and perhaps that also played a role. In any case, a Hitler supporter would have behaved differently.
Note: The reason was for Heisenberg not that he calculated the bomb much too big. In a meeting he once answered the question of how big the bomb would be: Just as a pineapple.
By the way, remarkable is that even in the office responsible for weapons development, the Heereswaffenamt, K. Diebner's group, which competed with Heisenberg's group, also worked on a reactor. Their boss E. Schuhmann once said that you could sleep more peacefully this way. So not all people were Hitler supporters, not even in German army
Thanks for your comment, I could not agree more with you.
It’s a pretty big assumption to say that making errors is proof on them not trying to make a bomb. It’s proof of them not understanding what it would take and moving in the wrong direction. It was, apparently, only after they knew of the bomb did they understand they were going down the wrong path, and as we see, that was after the war. I’d like to remind people that Heisenberg was well known for being a rabid Nazi. Despite his denials, I find it hard to believe he deliberately attempted to sabotage the Nazi bomb project, s he claimed after the war. It seems that he failed to understand the implications of the work. Additionally, when Hitler was presented with the idea of an atomic bomb at the beginning of the war, he dismissed it as he didn’t believe it was possible. Because of that, it was never funded to the point where it would be needed. It was only near the end of the war that Hitler, in his desperation, upon almost constant prodding, agreed to fund the project sufficiently. But by that time, it was too late and it went nowhere. There are a number of people, mostly German, but also a couple from elsewhere, who have been mounting a campaign in the past few years, to rehabilitate Heisenberg’s memory. This is part of that effort.
I wonder just how influential the Hungarian physicists' position was in deciding the outcome (I remember von Neumann, Szilard, and Teller having contributed to the Manhattan project).
Have you ever researched the german Post Offfice project?
oh yes, Thomas Powers' book contains plenty of details about the Post Office project; however, "Beyond Uncertainty" by David Cassidy is way more reliable. He also dedicates a big chunk of the book to this.
@@jkzero that’s helpful thank you. Did you ever look at Colonel Fletcher Prouty chapter 5 of his book secret team it is available on the Internet, describes, in the middle of a discussion of nuclear policy, a strange visit he took from Iran to Crimea during the war, he described the destruction of Rostov on Don. it couldn’t be reached by anything other than horses at the time, and the devastation was localized and intense
You do not need a nuclear reactor to make a uranium bomb. You do need one to make a Plutonium bomb. The Plutonium bomb also startled the German Physicists. It was the plutonium bomb that told them that the Allies were far far ahead of them as far as reactor science.
You are right, reactors are not needed for uranium enrichment; therefore, having a uranium bomb did not imply that the Allies also had a nuclear reactor; however, it is quite clear that a reactor is a first step on the development of the technology. Therefore, if they had a uranium bomb they must have a reactor. I assume that this is how the German interpreted it.
@@jkzero It was the Nagasaki bomb that confirmed to them that whatever nuclear knowledge that the German scientists had, the US was not in the market for it. Indeed the US knew far more.
Thanks so much for that clarification. Your videos have been incredibly illuminating for me.
But even if the uranium club had turned their interests to enrichment, would the state have had the ability to even deliver the electricity required to run it given the state of war?
@@bernardkealey6449 Thanks, I am glad that you find the videos of interest. After this series on nuclear weapons I started this year a series on quantum mechanics.
On your question, based on the documents and books that I have read, there was no way that they could have afforded the level of industrialization required to produce and separate plutonium, that was a gigantic enterprise in Hanford, the Germans didn't have the resources nor the facilities for that. Moreover, they were on continuous bombardment, any new factory building would be bombed right away. This is why von Braun and his team went underground for their rocket factories.
There is also a huge bunker complex in the Rhein-Erft district near Cologne.
This bunker complex houses a nuclear power plant from the Nazi era.
This was probably Adolf Hitler's hiding place.
An impressive list of references. Might I add one more? The book "Uncertainty: The life and science of Werner Heisenberg" by David C. Cassidy.
It's definitely worth a read.
Thanks for sharing, yes please, always feel free to use the comment section to suggest more materials. I have not read "Uncertainty" but "Beyond Uncertainty" (Cassidy's updated biography of Heisenberg) occupies a special place in my bookshelf. Remarkable book.
@@jkzero The title " Beyond Uncertainty" is definitely an interesting title for an updated biography entitled "Uncertainty". I haven't read "Beyond Uncertainty" but I have read, in addition to "Uncertainty", the play by Michael Frayn which focuses on the "uncertainty" aspect of what is known of Heisenberg's 1941 meeting with Niels Bohr. And I've read the companion book to that play.
You asked for it, so here it is: two more recommendations:
"Copenhagen" by Michael Frayn and "Copenhagen in Debate", edited by Matthias Dörries. What I like about this play is that it examines the nature of uncertainty.
I'm curious. Does the book "Beyond Uncertainty" dispel the uncertainty surrounding Heisenberg's attitude towards the war??
@@simian_essence Thanks for the extra references; interestingly, I have been to the theater only twice in my life: the first time I went to see "Copenhagen," the second time I went to see it again. I loved it. The BBC adaptation is quite good too, now I see Heisenberg every time I see Daniel Craig. As for "Beyond Uncertainty," one of the praise quotes is the best description: "Cassidy does not so much exculpate Heisenberg as explain him"
How do you calculate what level of enrichment is necessary for a bomb?
I do not know how Müller addressed this problem working for Heisenberg but I did a calculation in which you set the amount of enrichment to be a variable, call it f (for the fraction of U235 in a generic lump of uranium of unknown enrichment f) and calculate a general expression for the effective neutron reproduction called k, which must be k>1 for a self-sustained chain reaction. Then just make a plot of k vs. f using the measured values of cross-sections and secondary neutrons produced by fission and capture in U235 and U238 (we can ignore U234). All the details, calculation, and plots are in the video "Nuclear Bomb vs. Nuclear Reactor" th-cam.com/video/S-uMUq939dY/w-d-xo.html
Nice presentation! I'm quite convinced that the presented estimation by a random walk does not account for 3-dimensionality of space. So the estimate with a corrected formula should result in a shorter distance.
the mean-square end-to-end distance in a random walk is always lambda*sqrt(N), in 1D, 2D or 3D. How do you think a 3D treatment would modify Heisenberg's estimate?
@@jkzero Thank you for writing. In that case likely no modification of the estimate. Yes, in a very high dimensional space, in which we choose with every step a different (to the already choosen) orthogonal direction we obvious get with constant steps of size lambda, lambda*sqrt(N). Which speaks for your statement. I can not yet calculate it for 3 dimensions and a Poisson-distributed of mean step-size lambda with random directions. One shortcoming of the random walk argument seems to now, that with every reaction (i.e. step) the newly created neutrons are start making their own random walks and many stay in the volume (to be calculated) or will create descendants, which will stay in.
Underrated channel
Thanks for the endorsement; I wish I could get to wider audiences but the TH-cam algorithm is driven by engagement so you can actively help the channel by liking, subscribing, and sharing. This type of support is highly appreciated so I can continue making videos.
Not bad, some info was available since 1992 as you mentioned.
Sometime after the war, people from Project Manhattan looked at the Nazis' atomic bomb effort & concluded that Heisenberg & his boys were completely clueless about building an atomic bomb.
there is at least three places known where german nuclear bomb tests have been conducted in Germany and Poland. Maybe those scientists new they were being listened to? Or it were different scientists doing the tests?
Do you have any reliable source for this? (reliable meaning unrelated to Rainer Karlsch)
@@jkzero th-cam.com/video/uTyDPBQV55U/w-d-xo.html
I'm struggling to see any logic whatsoever in Heisenberg's critical mass calculation. Given that he's one of the greatest physicists of all time and I'm some guy writing a TH-cam comment, I assume I'm missing something but...
His argument is that neutrons do random walks with mean step-length 6cm, which seems plausible enough. If everything goes perfectly, it'll take 81 steps for the reaction to fission 1kg of uranium, and random walk theory says that, on average, a neutron will be at distance 54cm from its start point in that time, so he says that's the radius of a critical mass. Here's what I don't get:
1. The definition of critical mass has nothing whatsoever to do with fissioning 1kg of uranium. You get a completely different value for the critical mass if you instead calculate based on fissioning a gram of uranium, or a tonne. That cannot be right: a correct calculation cannot depend on the initial conditions of a thought experiment done by the father of quantum mechanics.
2. If the number of neutrons is doubling at each generation, then half of the neutrons were produced at generation 80 out of 81, so they're only going to travel 6cm; three quarters are produced during the last two generations, and so on. The average net distance moved by neutrons during the reaction is going to be much less than 54cm.
3. I just don't see the relevance of the calculation to the problem at hand. Heisenberg has calculated that a neutron emitted at the start of a chain reaction in an infinite volume of uranium will, on average, be 54cm away from its start point when the reaction has run long enough to fission 1kg or Uranium. So what? Suppose I have a 54cm-radius sphere of uranium. The first atom that goes pop will be nowhere near the centre of the sphere. On average, it will be about 42cm from the centre, so if it moves 12cm in the wrong direction, it leaves the sphere. But even if it starts in the centre, 54cm is only its average distance from its start point in an infinite volume. It doesn't necessarily stay within a sphere of radius 54cm of its start point: it will almost certainly stray farther away and later come back.
uiii 90th, I'm really glad youtube stopped showing me only mainstream videos
glad the mighty algorithm brought you here, welcome to the channel!
I thought german nuclear project had lack of funding... but i'm surprised it was because they just gave up
some historians keep debating which one was first... the chicken or the egg... the funding for the bomb program or just giving up. Given the evidence that I have read, it appears that the German scientists were in a comfortable situation by not promising a weapon that had no possibility to be completed during the war. The moral aspect appears to have been secondary.
Why is it that the random walk method gives a result so far from the right one? The only thing that comes to mind is that it assumes that the critical mass is dictated by the number of generations when no neutrons are lost when in reality you can loose a lot of neutrons and have the same result just a couple of generations later, because of how fast the numbers grow. Am I missing anything?
Using the random walk, Heisenberg "forced" a single neutron to fission every uranium nuclei, this is the key mistake: one neutron fissions one uranium nuclei, then moves until it encounters another nuclei and produces a second fission, and so on. In a real chain reaction, the neutron density grows exponentially but all the new neutrons also produce fission, this makes the reaction much faster and there is no need of a single neutron doing all the work. These new neutrons diffuse in the uranium while fissioning. The original neutron does not need to travel far, it can even be absorbed, that's irrelevant, there are so many new neutrons diffusing in the material fissioning it, that in the end the chain reaction is much more efficient than assuming a simple random walk. If you want the details check the video in which I solve the diffusion equation step by step: th-cam.com/video/DIuoFAW9H3E/w-d-xo.html
@@jkzero yes that was my sense as well, that considering every neutron in his calculation was what made the error so big. I thought about it some more and I believe it's because if you remove the outliers from the random walk, let''s say the 10% of neutrons that travel farthest, the average distance drops considerably. I mean I don't know how to show this mathematically, it''s just my intuition. I also realized that he made the assumption of starting with one neutron when in reality you don't know how many neutrons the reaction starts with, one is just the lowest number.
I saw the video about the diffusion equation, late last night, and it goes quite a bit over my head. But it still feels like something I would be able to learn. Way more interesting than what I learned in school. So thank you and well done.
@@SorinSilaghi yeah, the diffusion equation and its solution is quite elevated math; in any case, in that video you can see your point: you don't start with a single neutron but with a burst of neutrons denoted by N0
There is also a huge bunker complex in the Rhein-Erft district near Cologne.
This bunker complex houses a nuclear power plant from the Nazi era.
This was probably Adolf Hitler's hiding place.
Done❤
This was...Brilliant!
pun intended?
@@jkzero Of course, but it truly was a brilliant video.
@@peterrollinson-lorimer thanks, I hope you check the other videos too
For the safety of his family Heisenberg had to be seen by the Nazis as making a war time contribution. Having watched this excellent video I'm still not sure if the reactor work was an easy sop to allow him space to follow his real interests or he deliberately slow walked the project to ensure Nazis didn't get nuclear power let alone the bomb. Prior to this video I thought the latter but am no longer sure. Nazi incompetence would likely allow either explanation.
Absolutely love your videos ❤
Thanks, I am glad you liked the video. I am always curious to know what brings viewers to the channel, were you searching for something in particular or did the 'mighty algorithm' find you?
@@jkzero I used to work in explosives research and the concept of the explosive blast sphere often came up. We used to do a bubble test in a pond underwater. The test pond was in the shape of a parabolic dish approx 6m under water , an the size of the bubble was determined by the bubble oscillation and was detected on a microphone
@@wijpke Thanks for sharing, I have zero experience with explosives, I have only been interested in the physics of the phenomenon and got more serious about it after the Beirut explosion in 2020. I had some free time so I estimated the explosive energy of the Beirut blast using images and Taylor's method. I hope you find the other videos of interest too and welcome to the channel.
@@jkzero don't kid yourself explosives is all physics and you seem to know a lot about the subject.There are two energies when measuring explosives bubble and shock energy must be exactly the same for an A bomb.So your energy measurement must be bit low....
@@wijpke the Taylor regime can also be applied to chemical explosions but it is only valid in a narrow range of time and blast radius; I published two papers about this, in case you find them of interest: jsdiazpo.github.io/projects.html
Heisenberg had uncertainty about it, even in principle.
I see what you did there
Heisenburg got heat from the cubes. He knew doctor diaz. He knew 10 to the 24. He underestimated his calculations. He solved it thru accidentally making blue water. I love heisenburg because he had a short blue cold fusion. I think he got scared on the runaway power generation. Thank you for your work Dr. Diaz.
Of course we don't really know what was going on in Heisenberg's head.
you are totally right, we can only infer based in some unreliable sources. My interpretation from his calculations are clear: during the war Heisenberg didn't know how to calculate the critical mass; whether this was for moral reasons is unclear, but at least he didn't have to think about that.
Or If anything was...
I don't understand the mission given to Moe Berg. He was to determine if Germany was close to developing an atomic bomb, but Berg while highly intelligent was not a physicist. Was Berg even capable of understanding if the Germans were close to a bomb? That seems implausible to me.
Truth is, they never had Sillard's chain reaction. Admiral Carnas (Intel Grand Poobah) was never going to allow A-Bomb development. Only reason German Generals didn't assassinate Hitler early was the fear of reigniting WW1's stab in the back myth/narrative; thus, being deemed traitors, and starting the same chain of events, that is, dispite General Halder carrying a pistol on his person into Hitler's war,/study daily. And finally, during the Count von Staffenberg Plot, Hitler escaped death only because the explosive device was on the wrong side of a table leg. The main Prussian war Generals were all implicated and executed. Rommel, being a Nazi war hero, was allowed,l to die by his own hand. Upshot: Hitler was never going to get the big bomb(s), that is, even if Heisenberg figured how to make fissionible material, which was a joke when attempted. Please read Harold C. Deutch's "The conspiracy against Hitler in the Twilight War. Next!
You dramatically overestimate Heisenberg’s competence. The only reason he eventually figured out the correct answers is because he was forced to accept that his previous estimates of what was possible were clearly wrong, because the USA *had* a functional atom bomb.
Dr Diaz...heres a deal....swap my brain for yours....its a good one 😮
Thank gawd they +the Germans didn't discover plutonium during the war like we did things really might have been different
The Germans just didn't have the resources. They had some of the best people, but the Americans had such a large number of almost the best that they could imagine and solve questions faster than the Germans. And not only did the Americans give their scientists more resources, the Germans were inefficient with the resources they were given.
Physical chemist Glenn Seaborg from Michigan discovered Plutonium!
This is correct, Seaborg was first to synthetically produce and isolate plutonium; however, von Weizsäcker also realized in the summer of 1940 that natural uranium bombarded with neutrons could produce a fissile element beyond uranium, which is what they reported to the German army to proceed with their reactor research. In the UK the existence of plutonium was also theorized, and calculations showed that it would be fissile. Seaborg's discovery was not announced and kept secret during WWII.
Too keep the manhattan project motivated, the myth of the German A bomb was maintained by the US military…..the difficulty came when Germany was defeated.😊
What do we know about Japan's nuclear program during WWII?
I personally know little about the Japanese nuclear-weapons program. I know that Yoshio Nishina was at the forefront of atomic research at the time and under his leadership nuclear research took place but I know not much more. Nishina introduced quantum physics into Japanese classrooms in the same way as Oppenheimer did it in the US.
2:30 Washington state: its Hanford }} no D
ouch, rats! You are right, I messed it up
@@jkzero >> hey ! no big deal... i un fortune ately live about 3 hours away! Is ((was)) the worlds BIGGEST nuke waste storeage place...yikes !
I showed those video to my evangelical neighbor and he was INFURIATED! He thinks that anything that he doesn’t understand is “the work of the devil”. Unfortunately he homeschools his 5 children.
The little ones are going to be every bit as ignorant as their father.
The Chicago pile
Computing the critical mass assuming sheets of uranium (rather than in imploding sphere of uranium) is just dumb engineering - but Heisenberg was a theoretical physicist, NOT an engineer...
.... And of course you know fuck all about nukes....
very Good informative documentary !
from your name i can guess that you are from Mexico ,right ?
like & subscribe
Thanks watching and for liking and subscribing, this really helps the channel grow. I am glad you liked the video. I am originally from Chile. I am always curious to know what brings viewers to the channel, were you searching for something in particular or did the 'mighty algorithm' find you?
@@jkzero I came for the history. I know just enough to follow the physics and maths explanations. All of which seem logical to me.
It's really good to listen to your assessment of the primary sources statements and published works as your understanding of the science enables a degree of judgement as to the credibility or otherwise of the questions surrounding the people and their actions during the war.
Thanks for filling in some more of the gaps in my History of the World.
@@Anmeteor9663 thanks fro your kind words; I do my best to use the official and original sources so if anybody wants to check what I said they can just go and check; I want the content to be based on facts and science, I just mixed the content to make it captivating in the form of a nice story. My currently running video series on quantum mechanics is the same, I use only the original papers instead of the so many superficial narratives in textbooks, make sure to check it out
:)
Not the right map of Germany at the time
Love this. I am pedant myself, and this is the kind the pedantic comment that I really enjoy. Yes, you are totally right, I used a modern map for reference, I personally get confused when seen old-boundary maps, but you are right, I appreciate the correction.
Stop calling people by their last names. Call them by their first names.
So yes the fashi where good engineers but bad sciencetist
They were great scientists - that's why you know their names. I think it shows how that kind of political system makes following new ideas difficult if not impossible. They couldn't cooperate with each other fully because of the security state and resources were always being diverted to the leader's latest obsession - one that he could understand and fitted in with his emotions and preconceptions.
I don't know if they can be called particularly good engineers if you look at what their factories pumped out.
8:18 Wait now he feels guilt and not when he was working for the Nazis?
I would guess that, after what is discussed in the later part of the video, Hahn saw his efforts during his involvement in the Uranium Club just as pure reactor research, it was never a bomb program
@@jkzero It's kinda odd that he can compartmentalize it like that while his colleagues were fleeing the Nazis, I mean he even tried to recruit Bohr and that resulted in Bohr fleeing.
@@hedgehog3180 you are probably right, I think we spend time trying to justify our heroes, I had that issue for years with Heisenberg