A gunshot immediately panicked the campus of Johns Hopkins University in the United States, which had just been dismissed. Professor James Frank (James Franck) was so frightened that he found the student beside him lying in a pool of blood.
The 53-year-old professor immediately understood what was going on and immediately hid in a nearby classroom. The investigation afterwards confirmed his judgment that the target of the assassination was not the student but the professor himself. The mastermind behind the assassination was Hitler.
It was 1935, and Frank the Jew fled here from Berlin two years ago. At that time, Professor Theodore Lessing, who had fled to Czechoslovakia, was followed and assassinated by Nazi thugs in Mariambad. Frank did not expect that they would follow them across the ocean.
But in the eyes of the Nazi regime, the assassination of Frank was worth it. The 1925 Nobel laureate in physics also won the Iron Cross during World War I.
In 1933, when Hitler came to power and began to implement the racial policy, many Jews lost their jobs and were forced to flee. Considering Frank's reputation in Germany, Hitler allowed him to continue to teach at the University of Gottingen, but only if Frank dismissed the non-Aryans around him.
The Nazis had thought that Frank, who was under the roof, would bow his head and accept Hitler's terms. However, the professor not only resigned immediately, but also issued a statement questioning and opposing it. When he left, he also refused to hand over the nuclear energy-related parts of his research to Nazi scientists and technicians.
Hitler ordered formal approval for the arrest of the famous physicist. Fortunately, before the arrest, Frank had traveled from Denmark to the United States with his family. The exasperated Hitler decided to carry out assassination.
In fact, as the son of a famous German banker, Frank lived a life of luxury before he fled. At the age of 19, Frank entered the University of Heidelberg to study chemistry. He was criticized by his teacher for being overly playful and self-righteous. In the eyes of the young man, the teacher's rebuke seriously hurt his self-esteem. In a fit of anger, he decided to transfer to Berlin University.
After changing schools, he began to repent, got a doctorate through his own efforts, and finally got a teaching position at the University of Berlin.
There, he worked with Hertz to study the collisions between electrons and atoms and molecules. Their collision experiments became the first proof of the quantized properties of energy transformation and the first decisive evidence of the quantized energy levels assumed by the Danish physicist Bohr.
But when Bohr pointed this out in 1915, Frank and Hertz claimed in the paper that their experimental results did not conform to Bohr's theory. Until 1919, after a careful study of Bohr's theory, Frank changed his view and agreed with Bohr.
This bow finally allowed Frank and Hertz to discover the law that atoms are collided by electrons, and six years later, they became the winners of the Nobel Prize in physics.
It's just that Frank can't keep this Nobel medal for long. While Denmark was on the run, the Germans invaded Denmark. In order to prevent the medal from being stolen by the Germans, Hungarian chemist George de Hevesi dissolved Frank's Nobel Prize in aqua regia and placed the solution on a shelf in the laboratory of the Bohr Institute.
Frank, who was already a professor of physical chemistry at the University of Chicago, spent most of his time studying photosynthesis. When the United States decided to implement the Manhattan Project, Frank also became a member of the project to study and build the atomic bomb. However, the exile also has another status as chairman of the committee on political and social issues of the atomic bomb.
As a nuclear physicist, he knew the power of the atomic bomb and did not bow his head and remain silent because he lived under the eaves of a foreign country. He took the lead in organizing a group of nuclear physicists to submit a joint letter explicitly opposing the use of atomic bombs against Japan. It is true that the use of atomic bombs can gain some military benefits, but compared with arousing terror and disgust all over the world, the losses outweigh the gains, and will encourage a nuclear arms race after the war ends.
Two months before the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, Frank's committee released the famous Frank report on the military application of atomic bombs. The report ultimately failed to stop the military's decision, but the post-war nuclear standoff he predicted soon became a reality.
The bottle of solution that dissolved Frank's Nobel Prize was carefully taken down from the shelf in the lab by de Hevesi. The gold in the solution was precipitated, and the Nobel committee recast it into a medal, which was worn on Frank's chest. His country later hung the Planck medal on his chest.
In 1964, the man who escaped the assassination returned to his motherland to visit his old friend and died on the road. In the memory of his old friends, he is a man who is infatuated with science, sincere and kind-hearted, and has a gentle attitude. It's just that being gentle doesn't mean being gentle. This gentle man, even standing under the eaves, never bowed his head.
Author: Wang Bo
Post a comment