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Last night I was at dinner with a bunch of physicists, and I heard a fantastic story from an 80-ish year old physicist about why racism is bad for science.

So. If one was to pick exactly one physicist without whom the American nuclear program probably wouldn’t have succeeded, Enrico Fermi probably would be at the top of the list. Fermi was an Italian physicist and, to be blunt, very fucking good at his job. So good that in 1938 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. That good.

Now Fermi travels to Switzerland to pick up his big hunk of “I am a smart cookie” gold, as one does. And while he’s there, picking up his “seriously, the smartest cookie” gold medal, he gets a letter from his university. They’d fired him, you see. His wife was Jewish and with Italy allying with Hitler, that was apparently a deal breaker now.

Fermi didn’t even bother going back to Italy. He met up with his wife and they took a boat to New York City, where he asked a friend/colleague “what’s the best university for physics in this country?”, walked into Columbia University, dropped his medal on the Dean’s desk and got a job.

Shortly thereafter, when Einstein helped convince President Roosevelt that the Nazis would be working on their own atomic bomb and that the US needed to get there first, Einstein was asked “okay so who do you need?”. Fermi was at the top of the list.

Now in the end the Nazis and fascist Italy did not get even close to producing a nuclear bomb. The US rather obviously did. And no small part of that is probably due to some racist assholes deciding that who Fermi had married meant more to them than his skills. Hah. Take that you racist fucks.

Also the Nazis had awful problems with their tanks and communications because electrical engineering had been considered a Jewish science, the UK snapped up a ton of Jewish mathematicians for their code breaking project because pure math was considered a lesser scene at the time to which Jews were relegated, and also the US got Einstein from the Nazis because he was Jewish, and yeah the long story short is that we collectively had enough examples of the Nazis shooting themselves in the intellectual dick because of their racism to share stories for hours.