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Elusive truth of Farm Hall + New origin story for King Tut’s meteorite dagger

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The elusive truth of Farm Hall
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10...519a/full/

INTRO, EXCERPTS: It reads like an espionage novel by John le Carré: As the Allies swept across Germany at the end of World War II, 10 German nuclear physicists suspected of being involved in a Nazi atomic weapons program—including Werner Heisenberg, Max von Laue, Otto Hahn, and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker—were rounded up, interrogated, and brought in July 1945 to a mansion in the English countryside, Farm Hall (Operation Epsilon).

The “guests,” as they were officially termed by Allied intelligence, were held in that gilded cage for six months, and their conversations were secretly recorded. After the US dropped a nuclear weapon on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, talk among the guests quickly turned to the question of complicity. Had they wanted to build an atomic weapon for Adolf Hitler?

In 1992 the transcripts of the secret recordings at Farm Hall were declassified. With some of the most famous scientists of the 20th century openly debating their involvement with the most infamous criminal regime in modern history, many anticipated a historical “smoking gun”—something that would settle the question once and for all. But the debate about the nature of the German atomic project continues to this day. How can that be?

One reason is that only the transcripts of conversations from Farm Hall survive, not the original recordings. (Those recordings were never kept: Tape-recording technology was in its infancy in 1945, and the conversations were recorded on shellac disks that were resurfaced and reused after their contents were transcribed.) And a transcript is not equivalent to a recording. The written word flattens inflections in tone, which can convey emotions like passion or anger.

Moreover, the Farm Hall transcripts are not complete. The Allies recorded and transcribed only the sections they deemed important, which largely dealt with what the Germans knew about the technical aspects of bomb building. Other discussions were only summarized for Allied intelligence agents. Finally, aside from a few passages where it was deemed important to also keep the original German text, only English-language translations of the transcripts survive.

Even with those caveats, the transcripts are about as close as historians can expect to get to being in the room with their subjects. Among historians, the Farm Hall transcripts were generally seen as confirming an analysis presented by Mark Walker in his still-definitive 1989 book on the German atomic project: that there was no equivalent to the Manhattan Project in Germany because Nazi officials and German scientists believed that nuclear weapons could not be developed in time to be deployed in a war they expected to win quickly.

At the same time, Walker noted, German scientists did not conspire to prevent Hitler from developing the atomic bomb. Yet he was more prescient than he knew when he wrote, in 1992, that “almost everyone interested in the mysterious Farm Hall transcripts has sought to find in them evidence for their side of the debate.”

[...] Like the Farm Hall transcripts, Heisenberg’s visit with Bohr [in 1941] has been used to support drastically different interpretations of German motives. Those who see Heisenberg as a tragic hero assert that he was attempting to float a pact in which physicists on all sides would agree not to build nuclear weapons. Those who see Heisenberg as a villain claim that during the meeting he was spying for the Nazis and attempting to get Bohr to reveal what he knew about Allied nuclear plans.

[...] what they [the Farm Hall transcripts] truly reveal is how history is processed by humans. Heisenberg’s son Jochen put it well in 2019 when he perceptively noted that the Farm Hall guests were “stumbl[ing] through that complexity” of a historical moment that was “irreversible in its consequences for mankind.” Rather than definitively proving German atomic complicity or resistance, the Farm Hall transcripts illustrate how trauma and guilt are rarely, if ever, processed linearly or rationally... (MORE - details)


A new origin story for King Tut’s meteorite dagger
https://astronomy.com/news/2022/05/a-new...ite-dagger

INTRO: When archaeologists peered inside Tutankhamun’s tomb for the first time in the early 1920s, they found antechambers packed to the brim with thousands of artifacts: statues, furniture, jewelry, clothes, chariots, paintings. Among these possessions was an iron dagger — just over one foot in length and crafted from an iron meteorite — that would puzzle researchers for nearly a century.

It's easy to see why the researchers might be confused. The Iron Age, a period when people across Europe, Asia and Africa began making tools from iron ore through a process called smelting, is generally thought to have begun no earlier than 1200 B.C. — some 150 years after King Tut’s death. If smelting was off the table, archaeologists wondered, how might the dagger have been made?

Takafumi Matsui, director of the Chiba Institute of Technology’s Planetary Exploration Research Center in Japan, and his colleagues visited the weapon at the Egyptian Museum of Cairo in 2020 to find out. “A number of manufacturing processes are possible,” they wrote in a recent study in Meteoritics & Planetary Science, “such as cold working, in which an iron meteorite is cut and polished; hot working, involving high-temperature melting and subsequent casting; or low-temperature heating and subsequent forging.”

But their chemical analyses of the dagger's blade and gold hilt, combined with historical knowledge of ancient manufacturing techniques, now cast doubt on whether it was crafted in ancient Egypt at all. Instead, Matsui and his colleagues propose that the king of the nearby Mitanni empire gave the dagger to King Tut’s grandfather as a wedding gift... (MORE - details)
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