One Hundred Years At The Intersection Of Chemistry And Physics
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One Hundred Years at the Intersection of Chemistry and Physics
This volume, occasioned by the centenary of the Fritz Haber Institute, formerly the Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry, covers the institute's scientific and institutional history from its founding until the present. The institute was among the earliest established by the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, and its inauguration was one of the first steps in the development of Berlin-Dahlem into a center for scientific research. Its establishment was made possible by an endowment from Leopold Koppel, granted on the condition that Fritz Haber, well-known for his discovery of a method to synthesize ammonia from its elements, be made its director. The history of the institute has largely paralleled that of 20th-century Germany. It undertook controversial weapons research during World War I, followed by a "Golden Era" during the 1920s, in spite of financial hardships. Under the National Socialists it experienced a purge of its scientific staff and a diversion of its research into the service of the new regime, accompanied by a breakdown in its international relations. In the immediate aftermath of World War II it suffered crippling material losses, from which it recovered slowly in the post-war era. In 1953, shortly after taking the name of its founding director, the institute joined the fledgling Max Planck Society. During the 1950s and 60s, the institute supported diverse researches into the structure of matter and electron microscopy in a territorially insular and politically precarious West-Berlin. In subsequent decades, as both Berlin and the Max Planck Society underwent significant changes, the institute reorganized around a board of coequal scientific directors and a renewed focus on the investigation of elementary processes on surfaces and interfaces, topics of research that had been central to the work of Fritz Haber and the first "Golden Era" of the institute.
One Hundred Years of Chemical Warfare: Research, Deployment, Consequences
This book is open access under a CC BY-NC 2.5 license. On April 22, 1915, the German military released 150 tons of chlorine gas at Ypres, Belgium. Carried by a long-awaited wind, the chlorine cloud passed within a few minutes through the British and French trenches, leaving behind at least 1,000 dead and 4,000 injured. This chemical attack, which amounted to the first use of a weapon of mass destruction, marks a turning point in world history. The preparation as well as the execution of the gas attack was orchestrated by Fritz Haber, the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry in Berlin-Dahlem. During World War I, Haber transformed his research institute into a center for the development of chemical weapons (and of the means of protection against them). Bretislav Friedrich and Martin Wolf (Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society, the successor institution of Haber’s institute) together with Dieter Hoffmann, Jürgen Renn, and Florian Schmaltz (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) organized an international symposium to commemorate the centenary of the infamous chemical attack. The symposium examined crucial facets of chemical warfare from the first research on and deployment of chemical weapons in WWI to the development and use of chemical warfare during the century hence. The focus was on scientific, ethical, legal, and political issues of chemical weapons research and deployment — including the issue of dual use — as well as the ongoing effort to control the possession of chemical weapons and to ultimately achieve their elimination. The volume consists of papers presented at the symposium and supplemented by additional articles that together cover key aspects of chemical warfare from 22 April 1915 until the summer of 2015.
The Scientific World of Karl-Friedrich Bonhoeffer
In twentieth-century Germany, Karl-Friedrich Bonhoeffer rose to prominence as a brilliant physical chemist, even as several of his relatives—Dietrich Bonhoeffer among them—became involved in the resistance to Hitler, leading to their executions. This book traces the entanglement of science, religion, and politics in the Third Reich and in the lives of Karl-Friedrich, his family and his colleagues, including Fritz Haber and Werner Heisenberg. Nominated for the Nobel Prize, Karl-Friedrich was an expert on heavy water, a component of the atomic bomb. During the war, he was caught in the middle between relatives who were trying to kill Hitler and friends who were helping Hitler build a nuclear weapon. Karl-Friedrich emerges as a complex figure—an agnostic whose brother was a renowned theologian, and a chemist who both reluctantly advised German nuclear scientists and collaborated with Paul Rosbaud, a spy for the British. Illuminating the uneasy position of science in twentieth-century Germany, The Scientific World of Karl-Friedrich Bonhoeffer is the story of a man in love with chemistry, his family, and his nation, trying to do right by all of them in the midst of chaos.