Thread

1. expedition32 · 1790925650 · focus · HN ↗

   This was already known. The British put the German scientists into a big country house after the war and bugged all the rooms. After the US dropped the atomic bombs the German scientists spent weeks discussing with eachother how the Americans could have done it. They never got it right.

   1. smallmancontrov · 1790961229 · focus · HN ↗

      Heisenberg used a bad approximation that led him to incorrectly believe he would need tons of U235 to produce a bomb. His model for bomb viability was essentially "a random neutron walk should not leave the core until producing enough generations to explode." In reality, you don't need that much U235 because earlier generations have exponentially more descendants and they are closer to the core -- the later generations can leak neutrons out of the core like a sieve and the exponential party deep in the core won't even notice, effortlessly replacing them by cooking a tiny fraction of a generation longer.

      It was Peierls and Frisch, two Jewish German scientists, who figured out those dynamics, modeled them with the Neutron Diffusion equation, and repeatedly prodded UK intelligence until they were taken seriously. Then the project got sent across the Atlantic for safety and scale-up and the rest is history.

      Germany could have had the Atom Bomb in WWII, but Nazi Germany could not have because Jewish Science gave a decisive advantage.

      1. sandworm101 · 1790961479 · focus · HN ↗

         >> Jewish Science

         Jewish Scientists.

         1. darubedarob · 1790961753 · focus · HN ↗

            [dead]

         2. smallmancontrov · 1790961846 · focus · HN ↗

            I was mocking the Nazi attacks on the work of Jewish scientists which branded that work as "Jewish Science" and declared it inferior, because this whole story is a Reverse Uno card on that narrative.

            1. ahartmetz · 1790962468 · focus · HN ↗

               Some part of the German physics community even did "German physics" which did not include quantum physics and relativity.
            2. gloryjulio · 1790963067 · focus · HN ↗

               Agree with that. There were also 'Soviet Science'.
         3. eli_gottlieb · 1790963292 · focus · HN ↗

            Yes, but it would have been a better world if the Nazis had never invented the idea of Judenphysik in the first place. It stopped Gentile German physicists from working on whole areas of research!

            1. atq2119 · 1790963928 · focus · HN ↗

               I'm okay with that if it helped prevent Nazi Germany from building an atom bomb...
      2. darubedarob · 1790961620 · focus · HN ↗

         [dead]

      3. ianburrell · 1790962861 · focus · HN ↗

         Another problem is that Germans went for heavy water reactors and didn't even get as far as prototypes. Americans built graphite moderated reactors and quickly built plutonium production reactors at Hanford. Also, Allies were able to prevent Germans getting heavy water from Norway.
      4. antonvs · 1790964153 · focus · HN ↗

         > Jewish Science gave a decisive advantage.

         It's interesting, and concerning, to see the exact same thinking in the US today.

         The claim was that theoretical, mathematical models of physics, like special relativity, were a product of "Jewish thinking," designed to deliberately confuse the world.

         There's a recent video in which Tucker Carlson interviews Jess Elofson and they mutually agree that algebra is nonsense, with Elofson calling it "fake math". They didn't go so far as to relate it to some ethnic source (from the part I watched), but "designed to deliberately confuse the world" is the big selling point. The people they hate are people smarter than them.

         On the plus side, this is why these anti-intellectual movements always fail, because in the end they just can't get much useful done, other than attacking and destroying which doesn't require finesse or understanding.

         Edit: I have to retract what I wrote about not relating it to an ethnic source. Elofson literally used the term "goy slaves" in that interview.

         1. RajT88 · 1790965172 · focus · HN ↗

            The word "algebra" comes from Arabic al-jabr - so it's Muslim math to them I guess would be the talking point?

            With his seeming love of certain periods of German history, I think it's appropriate to observe that Tucker Carlson has a backpfeifengesicht.

            1. xhkkffbf · 1790979690 · focus · HN ↗

               It was invented before Islam began. I believe the creator was Persian.

               1. RajT88 · 1790995351 · focus · HN ↗

                  I took a spin through wikipedia - the roots go well back into pre-Christianity.

                  It's pointless to try and make this point with fans of Mr. Carlson. They don't want to know.

         2. throwawayffffas · 1790967952 · focus · HN ↗

            Wait until Tucker hears about imaginary numbers.

            1. ludicrousdispla · 1791020100 · focus · HN ↗

               maybe he'd just consider it a hyperbolic statement
            2. antonvs · 1791039775 · focus · HN ↗

               Even worse, complex numbers!
         3. belviewreview · 1790983354 · focus · HN ↗

            Fake math? Does he know that all the electric circuits in the equipment that is used to broadcast his program are designed using algebra?
      5. nostrademons · 1790989717 · focus · HN ↗

         It looks like Heisenberg wasn't wrong about the chemistry, only about the economics and willingness of Americans to throw massive amounts of resources at a project:

         > HEISENBERG: I don’t believe a word of the whole thing. They must have spent the whole of their ₤500,000,000 in separating isotopes; and then it’s possible.

         In reality, the Manhattan project cost about $2B, roughly ₤500,000,000 at the exchange rate of the time. And 85% of it went into building the huge isotope-separation plants in Oak Ridge and Hanford. Heisenberg's estimate was just about on the mark; he just didn't understand that America was willing to spend ₤400M building huge factories to do the necessary uranium separation.

         > WIRTZ: We only had one man working on it and they may have had ten thousand.

         In reality, America put 600,000 people to work on it. The Germans were incredulous because they could never get political buy-in for the massive scale mobilization needed to build the bomb. America was willing to spend more and employ more people.

         1. TitaRusell · 1791102598 · focus · HN ↗

            Germany just wasn't the kind of industrial powerhouse that the US and USSR were. Their whole blitzkrieg strategy was based on the knowledge that they could not win a war of attrition.

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