Portal:History of science/Article/Week 18, 2006
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Deutsche Physik (literally: "German Physics") or Aryan Physics was the name given to a reactionary movement in the German physics community in the early 1930s against the work of Albert Einstein, labeled Jewish Physics. The term was taken from the title of a 4-volume physics textbook by Philipp Lenard in the 1930s.
The movement itself began as an extension of a German nationalist movement in the physics community which went back as far as World War I. A number of German physicists, including Wilhelm Wien and the especially passionate Philipp Lenard had then signed a number of "declarations" that there was a need to remove a perceived unfair amount of British influence from physics (such as the renaming of German-discovered phenomena with perceived English-derived names, such as "X-ray" instead of "Röntgen ray"), and a declaration of the national character of science as a method of emphasising local differences in theory and practice.
When the Nazis entered the political scene, Lenard quickly attempted to ally himself with them, joining the party long before it was fashionable to do so. With another Nobel Prize in Physics laureate, Johannes Stark, Lenard began a core campaign to label Einstein's Relativity as Jewish Physics, decrying it as overly abstract, out of touch with reality, closely linked to moral relativism, and practiced exclusively by Jews and Jewish sympathisers.
