I like history with a moral but John Cornwall’s “Hitler’s Scientists” has too much of a moral. It’s a decent but disappointing book.
About the Nazi scientists, he asks: “Were these cases of Germans behaving according to type as Germans? Or scientists in Germany behaving according to type as scientists?”
There are risks to being a German and risks to being a scientist. Quite a few German scientists acted well. Some of these were employed during the war to make the atomic bomb – thus acting badly. Some of those who acted badly were employed after the war in the space program. Thus acting good. It’s hard to apply a moral.
Cornwall’s outrage is better when solidly grounded, as it is when he speaks about IG Farben and its so-called deconstruction. Considering what the cum-socks who ran that operation did –not just willingly but enthusiastically — they should have been hanged. Instead they served 8 years and became the CEOs of the companies IG Farben was broken into.
Cornwall also does an admirable job of exploding the myth of the German atomic bomb project but fails to convince me of Heisenberg’s role or lack of one. This uncertainty about Heisenberg undercuts Cornwall’s moral certainty.
“Hitler’s Scientists” is about careerism, funding and the dangerous lie that science is amoral. People entering the sciences should be required to read a book like this. But not this one. A better one.
Three hoots out of five.
2 comments
Melly
January 6, 2008 at 11:24 pm (UTC -5)
BASF and Bayer were clients of mine once. Yuck. You cannot imagine how hard it was visiting their chemical processes plants. Anyways …
Whoever says science is amoral is the same person who says guns don’t kill people …
Like everything else in life, there are inter-dependabilities and things do not exist on their own. There certainly are moral ramifications to science’s progress and inventions. These should always be examined.
The problem arises when religious zealots and other such types try to force their morality on science. But that’s a whole different story and this has been a long enough comment …
Ryan Oakley
January 7, 2008 at 2:29 am (UTC -5)
I dislike it more when they think their myths are science. (Creationism etc.) They can do what they please with their morality, bearing in mind that their right to swing their fist ends where my nose begins.