Science and Conscience

The Life of James Franck

Jost Lemmerich, Ann M. Hentschel

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780804779098
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

James Franck (1882–1964) was one of the twentieth century's most respected scientists, known both for his contributions to physics and for his moral courage. During the 1920s, Franck was a prominent figure in the German physics community. His research into the structure of the atom earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1925. After the Nazis seized power in 1933, Franck resigned his professorship at Gottingen in protest against anti-Jewish policies. He soon emigrated to the United States, where, at the University of Chicago, he began innovative research into photosynthesis.

When the Second World War began, Franck was recruited for the Manhattan Project. With Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard, he created a controlled nuclear chain reaction which led to the creation of a nuclear weapon. During the final months of the war, however, Franck grew concerned about the consequences of using such a weapon. He became the principal author of the celebrated "Franck Report, " which urged Truman not to use the atomic bomb and warned that a nuclear arms race against the Soviet Union would be an inevitable result. After the War, Franck turned his attention back to photosynthesis; his discoveries influenced chemistry as well as physics.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Science is not humanity’s only mission, nor is she its highest; but those under her dictate should carry out their mission wholeheartedly and with all their might. No matter what shape a scientific epoch may take, the mission always basically remains the same: to keep the sense for Truth pure and alive and to re-create as a cosmos of thoughts this world handed down to us as a cosmos of forces.

Adolf von Harnack, Bicentennial address before the Prussian Academy of Sciences, 1900

Unless there was some clear link to daily life, the nineteenth-century German public took little notice of the few scientists, let alone physicists among them or their research results. Justus Liebig’s Familiar Letters on Chemistry in the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung and Alexander von Humboldt’s Kosmos are exceptions, as these authors shared a personal interest in publicizing their scientific findings. But very few people realized that progress was the work of research and physical measurement. Hermann von Helmholtz’s appointment to his chair for physics at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin in 1871 and the construction of a new institute for physics on the banks of the Spree near parliament sparked more interest in the daily papers. Another occasion for reporting about the tasks of physical research and the reich’s science policy was the founding of a national bureau of standards. The debates in the Reichstag for and against the project were duly recorded. When the researchers took up their work in the new Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt (PTR), few people were aware of the kinds of problems, affecting both science and the economy, attached to the manufacture of standards for the meter, for example, or for the kilogram, the second, the volt, the ampère, or the ohm. The first president of this new institution in the capital’s suburb of Charlottenburg was a familiar name among educated circles: Helmholtz had offered many public lectures and written many popularizing articles, such as On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, that united the humanities with the natural sciences. His most influential papers in the areas of mathematics and epistemology lay beyond the reach of a more popular readership.

Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen’s discovery in 1895 was different. The reporting on those extremely mysterious rays capable of penetrating through the human body was much more extensive. X-rays had medical significance. But the science behind them remained largely unmentioned in the press. The nineteenth-century clash between those who were knowledgeable about physics and the government or church had yet to be fully settled, and new problems only added to these tensions, even though they lay less in epistemology than in physics. These debacles between academics and the wielders of power took place in the political arena. In 1837 seven professors at Göttingen protested against a constitutional amendment affecting their professional oath of allegiance as civil servants. Their protest, directed against the local regent, the king of Hanover, Ernest August, led to the professors’ dismissal and expulsion from the land. In those days the making and keeping of an oath was a highly held ethical value, so this deed by the Göttingen Seven, irrespective of its later Enlightened wrappings, was a sign of a new attitude among scholars toward state authority.

Almost forty years later, in November 1880, seventy-five notables, Theodor von Mommsen and Rudolf von Virchow among them, felt obliged to send Bismarck a manifesto against anti-Semitism.¹ It declared:

Racial hatred and the fanaticism of the Middle Ages is now being revived and directed against our fellow Jewish citizens in an unexpected and deeply shameful way in various places, especially in the Reich’s largest cities. [ . . . ]

The legal precept as much as the honorable precept that all Germans have equal rights and obligations is being broken. Implementation of this equality does not lie with the tribunals alone but also within the conscience of each individual citizen.

At that time, Lise Meitner—born in 1878—was two years old and Albert Einstein almost one. Max Born and James Franck would be born two years later, and the Dane Niels Bohr, in 1885.

James Franck spent his entire youth—almost a quarter of his life—in the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and another quarter in Berlin, where he became an accomplished scientist.² His first research was conducted during a period of peace. Only dystopians were painting a dark picture of the destruction of mankind and the world by scientific knowledge. Kaiser Wilhelm II’s “saber rattling” was not taken seriously. The Great War then revealed the terrifyingly destructive power of modern technology in general and poison gas in particular. The war also exposed an overflowing sense of nationalism joined in by many scientists. The image of the scientific community was badly tarnished.

Franck accepted a full professorship at Göttingen at the beginning of the twenties. There his renown as a researcher grew with his importance as an academic teacher. The signs of political unrest and of latent and open anti-Semitism only gradually became perceptible in liberal Göttingen. The National Socialists’ lunge for power in 1933, their illegal measures and state-ordered indignities toward Jews, first inside Germany and five years later throughout large areas of Europe as well, brought profound and fatal changes to Jewish life. Franck refused to serve under such a state and resigned his lifetime position in protest in 1933. Many of his more resourceful friends only barely escaped death under the inhumane Nazi regime, and many others became its victims. The Francks managed to emigrate to the United States with their two daughters and sons-in-law. The effect on Franck’s research was drastic. His focus changed fundamentally.

The lives of those among Franck’s scientific friends who had stayed behind in Germany, like Otto Hahn and Max von Laue, were hampered and endangered. These were descendants of the Enlightened men of 1880. But, unlike during the kaiser’s reign, during Hitler’s dictatorship they had to live under the constant awareness that if they dared to call publicly for the rights of their persecuted Jewish fellow citizens, they would be eradicated.

Most physicists were united internationally not only by a professional commitment to science but also by personal friendships. This union was broken by an unforeseen result of pure research: the discovery that neutron bombardment could cause the fission of uranium. The huge amount of released energy exposed the feasibility of an atomic bomb. Albert Einstein, prompted by Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner, decided to urge action dictated by reason. He warned President Roosevelt of the danger that Germany was possibly building such a weapon. The American government decided to counter this threat by building its own. Franck was asked to collaborate on this project. When Germany was forced to capitulate, he and some of his former collaborators turned against the idea of deploying nuclear arms. These events banished irretrievably to the past the centuries-long period of peaceful scholarly study in the tranquillity of one’s own laboratory.

CHAPTER 2

Youth and Education

Origins and Childhood in Hamburg

A second child was born to Jacob Franck and his wife, Rebecca née Drucker, on 26 August 1882 in the Hanseatic city of Hamburg. It was a boy. He was to be raised in the Jewish faith and go by the name of James.

Hamburg was the largest German seaport and second largest city of the reich. It was a vibrant place for an alert young mind to develop.¹ Since the Middle Ages, the city had been a member of the Hanseatic League together with Bremen, Lübeck, Lüneburg, Wismar, and many other cities. Its burghers and city council continued to emphasize this special standing when the league survived the Thirty Years’ War with little more than its name. In the nineteenth century this tradition encouraged a certain self-importance that generated problems during a period of political change. Despite its independence, Hamburg was unable to annex the Danish town of Altona right at its doorstep without outside assistance. This quarrel with the Holstein-Gottorp lords was unwinnable. When the Austro-German war with Denmark ended in defeat for the Danes, Altona was given not to Hamburg but to Prussia. The privileged burghers of Hamburg did not feel the urge, prevalent among many Germans, for a unified state. The free city continued to maintain its own embassies in many parts of the world and to make separate trade agreements. Membership in the North German Confederation was eventually allowed, but Hamburg did not join the customs union. Why give up one’s independence and fall under the dictate of Prussia, the leading voice of the Kaiserreich founded in 1871? Why bow to Bismarck’s policies? But the creation of uniform customs throughout the regions of the reich, to which Altona and Bergedorf belonged from 1880 on, drove Hamburg’s city council into a corner, and in 1881 it finally agreed to join the German empire as of 1888.

By doing so, the free city relinquished control over its currency, administered until then by its private banks. Their silver had to be exchanged for the reichsmark, causing great trepidation among bankers and the citizenry about an impending crash. The opposite happened. Trade was stimulated and the banking business flourished with it. The establishment managed by James Franck’s father, Jacob Franck & Co., probably also benefited. The plan to create a large free port fed this general economic upswing. A number of old neighborhoods in the harbor area were condemned for demolition, creating a huge demand for new housing. Hamburg became not just Germany’s most important seaport but the leading port on the entire continent. Only the harbor capital of its most important trade partner, England, was larger. Not even Napoleon’s continental blockade could completely stop all trade with the British. Shipments continued to arrive via Altona. Hamburg’s society had its share of England enthusiasts, and Rebecca Franck was one of them. The name she chose for her second child was James.

Products passed through Hamburg on their way to and from the farthest reaches of the Earth. Emigrants, mostly Germans, Russians, and Poles, traveled via Hamburg to far-off lands. In 1885 they totaled 47,118, the great majority of them embarking on ships to New York. There were years when the number of emigrants exceeded 100,000. A municipal authority working with the reich’s emigration commissioner oversaw their accommodation and provisioning and also monitored the shipping lines. It was only toward the end of the century that the employment situation within the reich began to improve and the exodus slowed.

With the wares from foreign lands came their peoples. Some stayed for just a few days, others came to settle. Global trade demands the ability to work with foreign partners and a certain measure of open-mindedness. In 1882 the city of Hamburg had just about half a million inhabitants. About 90 percent of them were of the Protestant faith, and the next largest religious community was Jewish, with about 3 percent members of the “Israelite Community,”² closely followed in number by Catholics. Baptists, Germano-Israelites, French Reformists, Mennonites, Evangelical Lutherans, Presbyterians, and members of the Apostolic Church formed other independent religious communities in 1889. Back in the middle of the sixteenth century, Jews had been driven out of Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain, and many of them had found refuge in this harbor town. Hamburg never had a ghetto. Portuguese Jews were not only allowed to settle down but also were soon granted equal rights. It was possible for them to acquire citizenship, which at that time was normally purchasable, and to hold public office.

The low birth rate among Portuguese Jews reduced their communities toward the end of the nineteenth century. Another factor in their decline was their tendency to set themselves apart from immigrant Jews from the East, who did not automatically receive the same rights when they came to Hamburg. But much had changed in the lives of European Jews since the beginning of that century under the influence of the Enlightenment. Many of Germany’s kingdoms and duchies, along with Switzerland and Italy, granted the same rights to their Jewish citizens as to their fellow Christians. This equality was introduced explicitly into the Prussian constitution of 1811. One exception was the official oath, which had to be sworn “bei Gott.” The sharp boundaries between the different confessional faiths became fainter, and conversions to other faiths began to be tolerated, even though conservative elements put up their utmost resistance. James Franck’s future teacher of physics in Berlin, Emil Warburg, converted to the Protestant faith as a young man in 1866.

Hamburg was a site of Reform Judaism from the beginning of the nineteenth century.³ “The New Israelite Temple Association” constituted itself there in 1817. This name was consciously chosen in reminiscence of Jerusalem. The term “synagogue” was not used, to avoid controversy. The breviary Das Hamburger Gebetbuch, first published in 1819 and reissued in 1842, is a legacy of these reforms. Gotthold Salomon was one of the preachers at the Hamburger Reform Temple. The new temple, built in 1844, accommodated 350 men, with room for 300 women on the balcony above. In 1859 Hamburg’s burghers had 192 councillors, 10 of whom were Jewish. Dr. Isaac Wolffson later represented Hamburg as a member of the Reichstag. Gabriel Reiser was vice president of the burghers’ council and chief justice. The father of the discoverer of electromagnetic waves, Heinrich Hertz, was a Hamburg senator. When James Franck was born in 1882, the community of Portuguese Jews was at the point of dissolving itself for lack of members. It decided to donate its substantial capital to a charitable endowment.⁴ Hamburg’s Jews were known for their social conscience and active involvement on behalf of others, not always members of their own faith, but there had been little interest among them in supporting religious education. So no lessons on Jewish theology were offered to upper-school pupils attending Gymnasium. The responsibility of such instruction was left to the boys’ fathers.

James Franck’s father was a devout Jew. Having attended a technically oriented parochial school, the Talmud-Thora Realschule, as a boy, Jacob continued to honor the Sabbath throughout his life, and kosher food was the daily fare at home.⁵ He acquired full citizenship in 1881. His father also was a deeply religious man. Ber...