Deutsche Physik - Origins

Origins

This movement began as an extension of a German nationalistic movement in the physics community which went back as far as World War I. During fighting between the German army and Belgian resistance fighters after the German invasion in Belgium, the library of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven caught fire when German troops looted and set fire to the town. The incident of the burning of the library led to a protest note by British scientists, which was signed also by eight distinguished British scientists, namely William Bragg, William Crookes, Alexander Fleming, Horace Lamb, Oliver Lodge, William Ramsay, Baron Rayleigh and J.J. Thomson, and in which it was assumed that the war propaganda mentioned corresponded to real behavior of German soldiers. In the year of 1915 this led to a counter-reaction in the form of an "appeal" formulated by Wilhelm Wien and addressed to German physicists and scientific publishers, which was signed by sixteen German physicists, including Arnold Sommerfeld and Johannes Stark. They claimed that German character had been misinterpreted and that attempts made over many years to reach an understanding between the two countries had obviously failed, so that conclusions had now to be drawn, in regard to the use of the English language by German scientific authors, editors of books and translators. A number of German physicists, including Max Planck and the especially passionate Philipp Lenard, a scientific rival of J.J. Thomson, had then signed further "declarations", so that gradually a "war of the minds" broke out. On the German side it was suggested to avoid an unnecessary use of English language in scientific texts (concerning, e.g., the renaming of German-discovered phenomena with perceived English-derived names, such as "X-ray" instead of "Röntgen ray"). It was stressed, however, that this measure should not be misunderstood as a rejection of British scientific thought, ideas and stimulations.

After the war, the affronts of the Treaty of Versailles kept some of these nationalistic feelings running high, especially in Lenard, who in a small pamphlet had already complained at the beginning of the war about England. When on January 26, 1920, an attempt had been made by the young soldier Oltwig von Hirschfelde to assassinate Matthias Erzberger, the German Chancellor, Lenard had sent a telegram of congratulation to Hirschfelde. After the assassination, on June 24, 1922, of the politician Walther Rathenau, when the government had ordered the flying of flags at half mast on the day of his funeral, Lenard ignored the order at his institute in Heidelberg. Socialist students organized a demonstration against Lenard, who on the occasion was taken into protective custody by the Jewish prosecutor of state Hugo Marx. This was not a sentiment unique to physics or physicists— this blend of nationalism and perceived affront from foreign and internal forces formed a key part of the popularity of the newly forming National Socialist Party (Nazis) in the late 1920s.

During the early years of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity was met with much bitter controversy within the physics communities of the world. There were many physicists, especially the "old guard," who were suspicious of the intuitive meanings of Einstein's theories. The leading theoretician of the Deutsche Physik type of movement was Rudolf Tomaschek who had re-edited the famous physics textbook Grimsehl's Lehrbuch der Physik. In that book, which consists of several volumes, the Lorentz transformation was accepted as well as quantum theory. However, Einstein's interpretation of the Lorentz transformation was not mentioned, and also Einstein's name was completely ignored. Many of these classical physicists resented Einstein's dismissal of the notion of a luminiferous aether, which had been a mainstay of their work for the majority of their productive lives. They were not convinced by the empirical evidence for Relativity: the measurements of the perihelion of Mercury and the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment might be explained in other ways, they thought, and the results of the Eddington eclipse experiment were experimentally problematic enough to be dismissed as meaningless by the more devoted doubters. Many of these doubters were very distinguished experimental physicists—Lenard was himself a Nobel laureate in Physics. Although the opposition to Einstein was expressed in scientific terms, his theories were also rejected as un-German. This is because Einstein was Jewish.