As a child of my age I had grown up in the conviction that it was
within the scope of man to shape his life according to the laws of
reason within him; his progress, in the sense in which I then
understood it, seemed assured by his increasing ability to determine
his own outer conditions with the help of science. Indeed, it was the
wish to take an active part in this progress that had led me to choose
my profession. Now, however, the war stood there as a gigantic social
deed which I could in no way regard as reasonably justified. How, in an
age when the logic of science was supreme, was it possible that a great
part of mankind, including just those peoples to whom science had owed
its origin and never-ceasing expansion, could act in so completely
unscientific a way? Where lay the causes of the contradiction thus
revealed between human thinking and human doing?

Pursued by these questions, I decided after a while to give my studies
a new turn. The kind of training then provided in Germany at the
so-called Technische Hochschulen was designed essentially to give
students a close practical acquaintance with all sorts of technical
appliances; it included only as much theory as was wanted for
understanding the mathematical calculations arising in technical
practice. It now seemed to me necessary to pay more attention to
theoretical considerations, so as to gain a more exact knowledge of the
sources from which science drew its conception of nature. Accordingly I
left the Hochschule for a course in mathematics and physics at a
university, though without abandoning my original idea of preparing for
a career in the field of electrical engineering. It was with this in
mind that I later chose for my Ph.D. thesis a piece of experimental
research on the uses of high-frequency electric currents.

During my subsequent years of stuffy, however, I found myself no nearer