3:30–4:30 pm
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Special Colloquium on J. Franck:The "Inner Necessity" of a Reluctantly Public Intellectual: James Franck as Leader of the Physics Community under Political Pressure
Richard Beyler, Portland State U.
Host: TBA
James Franck evidently did not aspire to be a public intellectual. If anyone comes close to Max Weber’s ideal separation between science and politics, it is this consummate experimentalist. Yet in critical situations, Franck was called upon to act as a spokesperson for his professional community. In the words of his resignation letter in the face of the Nazi purges, he felt an “inner necessity” to confront concerns that went far beyond the walls of the laboratory. In this presentation, I review Franck’s decisive rejoinder to Nazi ideology in 1933, his work to rebuild a research community in exile, and his role in creating the eponymous report on nuclear weapons at the end of World War II‒comparing these responses both to each other, and to the range of responses shown by other scientists at the time.