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Science and the Public Sphere Cathryn Carson |
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| Overview | Where would the scientist stand on the postwar West German stage? The events of 1945 — the revelation at Hiroshima of the global significance of physics, conjoined with the devastation of the German nation and the demolition of its cultural pretensions — opened up a many-leveled debate over the place and role of the scientist. My project examines the response to this situation articulated in the postwar career of Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976). One of the creators of quantum mechanics in the 1920s and a key player in the Third Reich's nuclear fission project, Heisenberg became a leading figure in the West German scientific community and in public life more broadly. The multifaceted role he helped to shape borrowed from the prewar model of the scientist as bearer and expositor of culture and reworked liberal notions of the academic as a voice for the public interest. These patterns were now adapted to the new Federal Republic of Germany in a period of social and political transformation. |
| Structure | The project is structured by the double character of Heisenberg's public role. The first half of the study addresses his cultural function in West Germany, contextualizing the popular-philosophical addresses that elevated him to iconic status. His contributions to the shaping of a scientific-philosophical role are examined in relation to his attenuated contacts with academic philosophy and his self-understanding as practicing a philosophically conscious form of quantum field theory. On the other side, his science policy career and his public political stances serve to sketch a limited postwar revitalization of the figure of the liberal scientist. The foundation was a partial rethinking of the place of scientific rationality in politics. The complexity of the process is epitomized by his part in post-1945 discussions of the wartime German nuclear project, where the symbolic overloading of political debate overwhelmed the subtleties of his position. |
| Ramifications | In these ventures Heisenberg exemplifies wider developments that reshaped scientists' roles in postwar public life. In a period of flux, he helped reconstitute the scientist as a figure legitimated to certain sorts of intervention beyond the narrowly technical. The study also uses his career to rethink certain aspects of the Federal Republic's first decades: cultural meditations on the nature of the new scientific-technical age, attempts to establish critical political authority vis-à-vis the Adenauerian consensus, debates over the role of the expert in a democratic order, and slow changes in addressing the legacies of the Third Reich. The project aims to reinsert the figure of the scientist into the West German public sphere, locating figures like Heisenberg amidst the developments to which, in their day, they were understood to be central. |
| Sources | Sources for the study include Heisenberg's published works (both popular and technical), interviews with his associates, research in federal, local, scientific, and institutional archives, and much newly exploited material in the Heisenberg collection. |
| Support | Support for the project has come from the Krupp Foundation and the American Philosophical Society (graduate fellowships), the Mellon Foundation (graduate and postdoctoral fellowships), the UC Center for German and European Studies, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the National Science Foundation (grant 9810433), and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. |