ALS in German, one page both sides, 5.25 x 6.75, illustrated Cunard Line, R.M.S. 'Queen Mary' letterhead, November 7, 1954. Handwritten letter from Werner Heisenberg to “Wentzel,” ostensibly his colleague, German physicist Gregor Wentzel, in full (translated): “Kindly accept many thanks for your letter and pardon me that I am only now answering. I was truly sorry not to have encountered you in Chicago, and I hope you had a wonderful time in Berkeley. In Chicago, we were extremely pampered and I learnt a great amount of new things; the sole issue that overshadowed the visit was Fermi’s grave illness. I was only happy to be able to see him again. Please give our greetings to his brave wife, from us all. To you and to all our common friends in Chicago, I send the most heartfelt regards!” In very fine condition.
Given its letterhead, it stands to reason that Heisenberg penned this letter asea during his voyage back to Europe after his brief lecture tour of America in 1954. Among his stops was at Princeton, New Jersey, where he reunited with Albert Einstein for the last time before the latter’s death the following year. Although Einstein was in poor health, he spoke physics with Heisenberg all afternoon. Regarding his own ‘uncertainty principle,’ Heisenberg found that Einstein’s view had not changed since the 1927 Solvay Congress. Despite all Heisenberg’s persuasive skills, Einstein just said, ‘No, that’s nothing. That’s not the thing I am after. I don’t like your kind of physics. I think you are all right with the experiments…but I don’t like it.’
Before he left America, Heisenberg made a trip to Chicago to pay a final visit to the revered physicist Enrico Fermi, who would die of stomach cancer at the age of 53, three weeks after this letter was written. Fifteen years earlier, in the summer of 1939, Heisenberg traveled to the United States on a lecture tour, and, while in New York, he convened with Fermi, who had recently emigrated from his home country. According to Malcolm MacPherson, Fermi directly challenged Heisenberg about his intended return to work in Germany, pointing out that atomic physicists would be expected by their respective governments to work on new weapons.
Taken aback, Heisenberg rationalized his position with hopes that the war would not actually happen, or the belief that ‘people must learn to prevent catastrophes, not run away from them.’ In the end, Heisenberg returned to Germany to play a central role in the development of a German nuclear weapon, while Fermi stayed in the United States and worked with Robert Oppenheimer in the Manhattan Project. Although unconfirmed, Heisenberg’s 1954 visit to Chicago may have been the first and last time the physicists saw each other following World War II.
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