IUPAP and the Interwar World of Science Article Swipe
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· 2024
· Open Access
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· DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198878681.003.0002
· OA: W4402655457
Like the other disciplinary unions that were established after the Great War, the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) bore the stamp of the punitive attitudes of the Allied nations towards the defeated Central Powers. From the start, the incongruity of claims to international status for an organization that had no place for Germany and Austria was a focus for contention in the physics community, and it remained so throughout the interwar years. Yet, even as challenges to the boycott gathered strength, moves to bring the Central Powers into the IUPAP fold in the 1930s encountered new problems, including the consequences of the crash and the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany. By 1939, the hopes of the advocates of German reintegration, IUPAP’s long-serving Secretary General Henri Abraham and Robert Millikan in particular, had been only partially realized, and the war left IUPAP facing nothing less than a relaunch of its mission.
