Did Werner Heisenberg and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker compromise with the Nazis? The story begins with Albert Einstein, who became a target for conservative physicists like Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark who could not follow Einstein’s physics, and the early Nazi Party that rejected Einstein as a Jew as well as his pacifism and internationalism. When Hitler came to power, Lenard and Stark gained great influence. Stark in particular tried to accumulate power but steadily lost influence through conflicts with other Nazis. When Stark’s nemesis, the theoretical physicist Arnold Sommerfeld, was going to retire and be succeeded by Werner Heisenberg, Stark launched a vicious attack on Heisenberg in the SS newspaper. Heisenberg appealed to SS Leader Heinrich Himmler and thanks to support from the aeronautical engineer Ludwig Prandtl was eventually rehabilitated by the SS. The established physics community then launched a counterattack against the “Aryan Physics” of Lenard and Stark, which included writing Einstein out of the history of relativity theory. This was arguably Heisenberg’s greatest compromise with Nazism.

This paper deals with the Palmyrene divine title MR ‘LM’ which can be translated as Master of the World, of the Universe or of the Eternity. As a point of departure, it takes the theory of relativity and the sense of the time and space in the reference to the divine competences. Does the god called by this particular name have unlimited power, when he is the ruler of the entire universe and time? This paper shows the equal relevance of the title to the two Palmyrene gods: Bel and Baalshamin, remembering the transdivine character of the epithets

We introduce Part II by sharing the story of the LIGO experiment which validated Einstein’s theory of general relativity and which many consider to be the “discovery of the twenty-first century.” While Einstein’s discovery was made by a single scientist, the LIGO experiment involved the contributions of over 1,000 authors. These two discoveries, made 100 years apart, speak to the changing nature of science, where 90% of papers now are written by teams. In Part II we will explore the implications of collaborative work, the benefits and challenges of working in teams, and the factors that help and hinder team effectiveness.