The purge of German science in 1933
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The purge of German science in 1933
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Re: The purge of German science in 1933
#2Long and interesting article from 2024, the title is "The Great Purge (1933)" (which kind-of clashes with the HN conventions ...)
Re: The purge of German science in 1933
#3Long and interesting article from 2024, the title is "The Great Purge (1933)" (which kind-of clashes with the HN conventions ...)
Thanks—I've edited the title a bit to solve that problem.
Re: The purge of German science in 1933
#4I wonder just how advanced Germany would be nowadays without the World Wars.
Re: The purge of German science in 1933
#5This goes to show how prestige and reputation built up over centuries can be destroyed in a matter of decades.
Also the prestige and reputation of institutions rest solely on the superstars that are in that institution. A single prominent scientist can carry the prestige of an entire institute. This means when they leave, the reputation goes with it.
Re: The purge of German science in 1933
#6It occurs to me that anti-semitism is a disease that ultimately destroys its host.
If Germany "simply" wanted to win WW2, it should have cultivated its Jewish scientists (and by the way, 100K Jewish soldiers served their country in WW1) instead of eradicating them as per this article. Not to mention, diverting scarce wartime resources towards the program of concentration camps and ethnic extermination is not just pure evil - but strategically stupid.
It seems very clear that Hitler and his friends hated the Jews more than they wished for some positive outcome for Germany. This pattern repeats throughout history including in the modern day.
Ultimately, once you start optimizing for your hatred vs your love (of your own people, for example) you're going to make decisions that doom you.
Re: The purge of German science in 1933
#7I wonder just how advanced Germany would be nowadays without the World Wars.
If you mean like jetpacks and robots, it would probably look the same as our current timeline, given that "nowadays" is 70 years later plus the global diffusion of technological progress.
Perhaps the real question is how much incrementally-better everywhere would be without old wars.
Re: The purge of German science in 1933
#8One aspect of this that fascinated me is Nazi Germany's "physics denialism" (?) — the reactionary response to the modern physics revolutions of the early 20th century. (I.e. the twin revolutions of quantum physics and of relativity). It was a much weirder response than simply an attack on physicists who happened to be Jewish humans. Fields of physics were conspiratorially labelled as having a "Jewish" character, and dismissed as psuedoscience, as pathological science: "Jüdische Physik". There was a fanaticism that's hard to grapple with philosophically, a thing that's far outside rationality, a magical thinking. How much more "magical" can you get than disregarding natural physical laws, and substituting your own? That's the definition of magic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik ("Deutsche Physik" or "Aryan Physics")
Re: The purge of German science in 1933
#9One aspect of this that fascinated me is Nazi Germany's "physics denialism" (?) — the reactionary response to the modern physics revolutions of the early 20th century. (I.e. the twin revolutions of quantum physics and of relativity). It was a much weirder response than simply an attack on physicists who happened to be Jewish humans. Fields of physics were conspiratorially labelled as having a "Jewish" character, and…
The depictions of "wrong physics" in the 3 Body Problem show kinda remind me of that. Any kind of thinking that had even a whiff of going against the party line would cause problems for the author. What a weird time.
I wonder if it's similar to how we look down on e.g. string theory, except I don't know if that's an apples to apples comparison given that we haven't seen any string theory apples yet :-)
Re: The purge of German science in 1933
#10[deleted]