Memoirs of a Physicist in the Atomic Age by Walter M. ElsasserMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Elsasser was the founder of the dynamo theory of the Earth's magnetic field, and also had a successful career in other areas of physics, nuclear physics in Paris with the Joliot-Curies, for example, as well as meteorology. He was prolific, and published many journal articles in these areas. In his later life he turned to biology, and wrote three books on biophysics that never were quite accepted by the biological community.
In this book, he gives a more personal view of famous physicists of the early 20th century (Curie, Born, Oppenheimer, Wigner, Schroedinger, etc) than the well-known histories by Gamow and Segre - i.e., less physics - but interesting and enjoyable. His philosophical ideas I sometimes could not follow (or agree with), but the fact that he interacted professionally with so many famous physicists made for an interesting life - and an interesting read.
One scene that depicted 1922 Germany was especially eye-opening. While I knew that Philipp Lenard (Nobel Prize Physics 1905) was a strong supporter of the Nazi party, I didn't realize the extent to which this permeated his lectures, and the extent to which anti-Semitism had quickly escalated after World War I. Elsasser describes his first physics lecture at the University of Heidelberg like this:
“Every seat in the hall was taken. In walked Professor Lenard wearing an impeccably tailored suit; to his left breast there was fastened a silver swastika of gigantic proportions, perhaps ten centimeters square. This was most unusual, if one remembers that in spite of war and revolution, Germany had then still remained a place of law and order. A distinguished senior professor was most certainly not expected to brandish symbols of political extremism in class. But the students thought otherwise. They applauded intensely. They clapped, and then they shouted; they kept on clapping and shouting, on and on and on. How long this continued I cannot say precisely, but it was certainly the most dedicated and loudest ovation I ever witnessed in my life, before or after."
The recent (2017) biography on Einstein on the National Geographic channel, "Genius," depicts a similar scene in one of Lenard's lectures. There, he refuses to cancel class for the funeral of the assassinated Jewish politician, Walther Rathenau, and instead lectures to supportive students about the need to abolish the "Jewish physics of relativity" and return to "pure German physics."
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UPDATE: In Jeremy Bernstein's biography Einstein, he describes anti-Semitic (and anti-Einstein) activity even earlier, in 1920:
"In 1920 an anti-Einstein League was formed in Germany, and it offered substantial sums of money to anyone who would write refutations of Einstein's work. On August 24, 1920, the League sponsored a meeting in the Berlin Philharmonic Hall, which Einstein himself attended, where swastikas and anti-Semitic pamphlets were on sale, at which Einstein and his work were attacked. A few of his colleges respond in a letter to the 'Berliner Tageblatt' and a few days later Einstein himself wrote an angry letter, also published by the 'Berliner Tageblatt' --- which deeply shocked Ehrenfest, who seemed to feel that Einstein should have ignored the matter as unworthy of his attention. From this time on, until he finally left Germany in 1932, Einstein and his work were the targets of a steadily mounting campaign."
