MOE BERG REVISITED.

MOE BERG REVISITED. I posted here on how Moe Berg, a polymath who spent many years in the major leagues as a catcher, went to a lecture by Werner Heisenberg in Switzerland during World War II with instructions to kill Heisenberg if the lecture showed that Germany was far along on building an atomic bomb. Russell Seitz of the Department of Physics at Harvard has a letter in the Economist for September 12 about how Berg decided there was no need to kill Heisenberg. He also has a story about how Berg got the assignment from the OSS. The head of the allied operation which was monitoring Nazi nuclear science refused the assignment because “physicists do not shoot other physicists.” Berg, of course, was not a physicist.