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...

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