Weinberg takes up a National Science Foundation predoctoral fellowship to study at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. He is encouraged to take up research on nuclear alpha decay. His advisor, Gunnar Källén, tasks him with studying the Lee model. He plans to obtain his PhD from Princeton.

When Otto Hahn, Werner Heisenberg, and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker returned to Germany from Farm Hall, they needed to justify their wartime work on uranium without appearing to have betrayed the German war effort. Hahn was aided by his Nobel Prize and his presidency of the Max Planck Society. Hahn used his prestige to systematically defend German science and repress its nazification, contributions to the war effort, and participation in war crimes. Heisenberg and Weizsacker helped create the legend of Copenhagen: they had supposedly traveled to occupied Denmark in order to persuade Niels Bohr to help them forestall all nuclear weapons. This legend was popularized by the author Robert Jungk, but denied, at least privately, by Bohr. When the West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer and his Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss suggested that the Federal Republic should have its own nuclear weapons, Hahn, Heisenberg, and Weizsäcker joined fifteen other prominent German scientists to issue the Göttingen Declaration, rejecting West German nuclear weapons and refusing to participate in the development of such weapons. Weizsäcker subsequently refined his stance on nuclear weapons.

In order to determine what really happened when Werner Heisenberg and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker met with Niels Bohr in occupied Copenhagen in September 1941, this visit has to be placed in several contexts. By this time the German uranium research had demonstrated that atomic bombs were probably feasible, even if not for Germany during the war. The summer 1942 German offensive against the Soviet Union had not yet begun to falter, although Heisenberg was nevertheless privately very anxious about the war. The Germans alienated Bohr and his colleagues by their participation in cultural propaganda and nationalistic and militaristic comments about the war. A comparison with Heisenberg’s other lecture trips abroad shows that he acted the same way in other places. Heisenberg’s subsequent efforts in 1942 to gain support from Nazi officials by both describing the power of atomic bombs and the threat that the Americans might get them first also do not fit with an attempt at Copenhagen to forestall all nuclear weapons. Instead the best explanation for the visit is Heisenberg and Weizsäcker’s fear of American atomic bombs falling on Germany.

Heraclitus’s doctrine of a cosmogonic unity of opposites held together in harmoniēis the topic of “Heraclitus and the Quantum.” Like Anaximander, Heraclitus posits a self-organizing universe in which objects and agents interact to form relational wholes. It is argued that Heraclitus’s ideas anticipate physicist Niels Bohr’s atomic theory of complementarity and the systems thinking of early cyberneticists. Extended from a description of the cosmos to a prescription for living, Heraclitean harmoniē, it is argued, is tantamount to sustainability, and provides a profounder, more durable alternative to some modern prescriptions circulating under the same conceptual umbrella.