After drastic cuts to the NIH, the FDA, the NSF, and the DOE, NASA science faces down its smallest budget ever. All of society will suffer.
It should be every scientist’s greatest fear: that 2025, in the United States, will mirror very closely what happened in Nazi Germany in 1933. In the 1920s and 1930s, physics and mathematics in Germany was second-to-none. Einstein achieved his great successes in Germany, and was lauded as a national hero for his work on relativity, quantum physics, the equivalence of mass and energy, and more. Lise Meitner, the first woman to become full professor (außerordentlicher) of physics in Germany, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, and a codiscoverer of nuclear fission, was called “the German Marie Curie” by Einstein himself. Hans Krebs, Fritz Haber, Otto Stern, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner, Otto Frisch, Max Born, Felix Bloch, Hans Bethe, and Viktor Weisskopf, among others, were incredibly prominent and successful German scientists during this time.
And then, on April 7, 1933, Germany passed a law making it illegal for those considered to be Jewish to hold any civil service jobs, including as physics or mathematics professors. By time the year ended, 18 mathematicians at the…
