Chapter 15
LIFE-EXPERIENCE AND NOT SCIENTIFIC EXPERIENCE
B
y the time Hitler succeeded in dispersing German scientific talent around the world, quantum mechanics had already gone global. No country gained more from the exodus of Jewish intellectuals than the United States, but American science was already rising in the world ranks on its own merits. European scientists had been crossing the Atlantic even before 1914, and did so increasingly as international tensions calmed after the war. They frankly admitted that their American adventures brought home gratifying amounts of pocket money, but as the years went by, they could hardly fail to notice the increasing sophistication of the audiences they encountered. Meanwhile, young Americans flocked to Europe to pick up the new physics—one American visitor to Göttingen in 1926 found more than twenty of his fellow countrymen already
