{"id":275,"date":"2006-05-31T10:26:28","date_gmt":"2006-05-31T10:26:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/05\/31\/shameful-history\/"},"modified":"2006-05-31T10:26:28","modified_gmt":"2006-05-31T10:26:28","slug":"shameful-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/05\/31\/shameful-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Shameful History"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We had an interesting colloquium yesterday from Mark Walker, a colleague in the History department, on the subject of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Peter_Debye\">Peter Debye<\/a>, a Dutch chemist and Nobel laureate. It seems that a book published last year on Einstein in the Netherlands included some material accusing Debye of being a Nazi collaborator, which touched off a major controversy. The University of Utrecht renamed their Debye Institute, and Maastrichty University removed Debye&#8217;s name from a scientific research prize.<\/p>\n<p>The main point of the talk is pretty well summarized in the piece Mark co-wrote for the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dpg-physik.de\/dpg\/organisation\/fachlich\/gp\/debye_en.html\">German Physical Society<\/a> (Debye was the president of the society in 1937-9, and the main charge against him is that the last Jewish members were expelled on his watch). He made a strong case that while Debye was personally ambitious and fairly successful under the Nazi regime, his actions weren&#8217;t really significant or enthusiatic enough to rate being called a &#8220;collaborator.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The talk was a striking reminder, though, of how politics can warp science, and how the pursuit of scientific goals can lead even good people (Debye helped Lise Meitner to escape Germany, at some personal risk) to do things that history will regard as shameful. Based on the documents Mark showed, Debye appears to have been better than many of his colleagues, but that&#8217;s not a high bar to clear.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We had an interesting colloquium yesterday from Mark Walker, a colleague in the History department, on the subject of Peter Debye, a Dutch chemist and Nobel laureate. It seems that a book published last year on Einstein in the Netherlands included some material accusing Debye of being a Nazi collaborator, which touched off a major&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/05\/31\/shameful-history\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Shameful History<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}