Talk:Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker

Freiherr or not?

The article says: "Note regarding personal names: Freiherr is a title, translated as Baron, not a first or middle name." This is not true. All noble titles were abolished in Germany in 1919. People who wanted to go on using them had to incorporate them into their surnames. The subject of this article is called either Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker or Carl Friedrich Freiherr von Weizsäcker. If it is the latter, then his surname is Freiherr von Weizsäcker and that is what the article should be headed. If on the other hand his surname is von Weizsäcker then we don't need to mention Freiherr at all. Intelligent Mr Toad (talk) 14:10, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

Theory of Ur-Alternatives

Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker pioneered the theory of ur-alternatives in the 1970s and further developed it in the 1990s (see his book "Zeit und Wissen"). It axiomatically constructs quantum physics from distinguishing between empirically observable, binary alternatives. Weizsäcker used it to derive the 3-dimensionality of space and to estimate the entropy of a proton falling into a black hole. The theory represents an important contribution to digital physics. It should be mentioned. Discrepancy (talk) 19:57, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

Contribution to atomic weapons

According to all sources now available it is highly convincing that 1. the group Heisenberg-Wirtz-Weizsäcker wanted to find out as much as they could about nuclear physics. Weizsäcker wanted to decide later what to reveal to the (Nazi) authorities. Later he regretted that and was glad that there had been no opportunity to try it out. (That they did not want to support Nazi rule was quite evident for all three of them!) 2. the group was convinced very soon that they would have no possibility to build an atomic bomb. Thus they did not have to ask themselves whether they should try build a bomb or not -- they knew they were not able to.

The quotation from William Sweet violates the commitment to the neutral point of view and should be deleted.

-- MiDri (talk) 15:57, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

A non-neutral point of view is allowed if it is attributed to an external source, and not presented as the point of view as Wikipedia. See WP:SUBSTANTIATE which is part of WP:NPOV. In this article NPOV forbids writing as fact that what Heisenberg and von Weizsacker said has been flatly untrue, but allows quoting William Sweet's statement that what they said has been flatly untrue. Dirac66 (talk) 01:37, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

I haven't studied this topic enough to come down on either side in terms of facts. However, NPOV is a bit more nuanced than that. WP:FRINGE and (especially) WP:UNDUE are also potentially relevant. NPOV certainly does not allow for the selection and placement of quotes so as to give undue prominence to a marginal or minority theory over widely held ones. If the Sweet opinion is in the minority, then it must be balanced out proportionately with the contrary statements of those on the other side of the debate. Badgerpatrol (talk) 12:05, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

True. So we need the opinion of an expert familiar with the literature on the wartime activities of Heisenberg and von Weizsacker. I will make a request on the talk page of User:Bfiene, who has contributed extensively this past summer to the Heisenberg article, especially the various controversies in which Heisenberg was involved. Dirac66 (talk) 00:42, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

Provided he's shown himself to be neutral on the subject in the past. Badgerpatrol (talk) 09:02, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

it is obvious from his other work that he was not a fan of nukes. article is wishy washy on the whole — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.190.34.142 (talk) 19:13, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Commentary on quote attributed to Sweet

The quote attributed to William Sweet in the article on Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker would have us believe that “just about everything” either Heisenberg or von Weizsäcker said about the nuclear energy project in Nazi Germany was “flatly untrue”. This seems to be a bit of a stretch. There can be no doubt that biases, failing memories, and apologia influenced their statements after WW II, but one has to seriously question the assertion that just about everything they said about the German nuclear energy project was flatly untrue.

As Mark Walker said, one needs to look at these things “with the eyes of a historian, not of an apologist or antagonist.” [Mark Walker, German National Socialism and the Quest for Nuclear Power 1939 – 1949 (1993) 223] This applies to both the quote attributed to Sweet as well as the rest of the presentation in the von Weizsäcker article’s subsection “Work on atomic weapons”, which focuses on only a small part of von Weizsäcker’s career, and mostly highlights some controversial elements, which tend to demand lengthy treatments to put them into a clear and accurate historical perspective.

The myth of the German atomic bomb was a highly visible part of postwar apologia. The apologia was that a small group of Nazis had taken control, but they had been removed. Note that the real leaders of the German atomic energy project, Abraham Esau, Erich Schumann, and Kurt Diebner, were ostracized after the war. Hence the German scientific community denied its past and purged itself of the Nazi elements, thus making way for their acceptance back into the international scientific community. Walker went on to say [Mark Walker, German National Socialism and the Quest for Nuclear Power 1939 – 1949 (1993) 231-232], and I quote: “The role of Heisenberg as spokesman for the German nuclear power project was important for the apologia as well, for his erroneous claim, that he had been in control of nuclear power research, was accepted uncritically by friends and critics alike. In part, this acceptance is to be attributed to the perception of science by scientists and laymen as reducible to the work of a few ‘great’ scientists. Control is the key aspect of the apologia, for only if Heisenberg and his colleagues had been in command of their research, could their claim, that they had steered it deliberately away from nuclear weapons and towards ‘peaceful nuclear energy,’ appear believable.” Bfiene (talk) 21:11, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for your comments based on your evident familiarity with the subject. Based on this expert opinion I have now removed the William Sweet quote from the article as unbalanced. My knowledge of the subject is insufficient to make other changes to this subsection, but you or others may wish to. Dirac66 (talk) 22:45, 9 October 2008 (UTC) I find the quote "... the son of the German Under-Secretary of State, von Weizsäcker, is attached to the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut in Berlin where some of the American work on uranium is now being repeated" attributed to Einstein very interesting. I wonder what American work he is referring to. Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner and Fritz Srassmann (three Germans) discovered nuclear fission in 1939 and Hahn received the Nobel Prize for this in 1944. Einstein was from Germany and formulated the Theory of Relativity, Max Planck laid the foundation for Quantum Mechanics with his Quantum Theory. Heisenberg, Schrodinger and Pauli were all German (or Austrian). Other Europeans such as Niels Bohr and Ernest Rutherford contributed greatly also, but American contibutions were minimal. The US only became a scientific power when Europeans such as Einstein and Fermi emigrated there. Even the head of the Manhattan Project during WW II (Robert Oppenheimer) went to Germany to receive his PHD at Gottingen University. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.36.255.91 (talk) 17:14, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

Pronunciation

Can I pronounce it as "wiseacre"? Or maybe "vites-zekker"?Lestrade (talk) 21:39, 9 December 2009 (UTC)Lestrade

The German pronounciation would be "vi-tsekker" with the stress in the first syllable, cheeres, jan --JanBarkmann (talk) 22:45, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

biography

I think that mentioning of CFW's death in 2007 followed by a contested fact about Nazi support to be in bad taste. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 118.208.196.47 (talk) 10:48, 5 November 2012 (UTC)

Bad taste and probably inaccurate. the Foreign Office was a center for the anti-Nazi resistance, and if the man belonged to a "group" consisting of Admiral Canaris and General Beck, he likely did work against Naziism and certainly knew of some of the plots to overthrow and/or kill Hitler.

External link?

Would an interview with transcript with Carl von Weizsacker from 1986 be useful here as an external link? Focus of conversation is nuclear weapons policy. http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_202F51331DFA43FFBF9421F9A8B70616 (I have a conflict of interest; otherwise I would add it myself.) Mccallucc (talk) 14:13, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Assessment comment

The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.

Comment(s)

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Some of this entry came to my attention by being repeated in newspaper obituaries of the recently-deceased Weizsacker. The discussion in the article of "die Lesart" is unbalanced and misleading. To begin with, the "die Lesart" was not what "it was called among themselves" but was von Laue's disparaging description in correspondence written many years later - see Cornwell p398. The assertion, in the quoted passage from Sweet, that "everything said ... [by Heisenberg and Weizsacker] has been flatly untrue" is a great exaggeration which the balance of Sweet's article does not attempt to make good. The various other references in the text to deliberate falsity, untruthfulness etc, fall into the same category. A more accurate description of the criticisms which have been made in the Cornwell book and by the various writers who are relied on by Sweet would be that, in their accounts of events Heisenberg and Weizsacker told a selective part of the truth, so as to paint themselves in a better light than a more complete account of events would show. Thus, footnote reference 5 to p398 of Cornwell, includes nothing to the effect that the article claims ... "exposure as a deliberate falsehood". The Wikipedia article on Heisenberg is a far more balanced account of the controversy surrounding the Nazi atomic research project. Tyrah These concerns have been addressed in the meantime. jan 84.132.239.62 (talk) 23:02, 1 February 2010 (UTC) Tyrah 09:26, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

Last edited at 23:02, 1 February 2010 (UTC). Substituted at 10:54, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

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