Astronomers unknowingly dedicated moon craters to Nazis. Will the next historical reckoning be at cosmic level?

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/science-and-technology/astronomists-unknowingly-dedicated-moon-craters-to-nazis-will-the-next-historical-reckoning-be-at-cosmic-level?utm_source=Nature+Briefing&utm_campaign=a1a9bf577f-briefing-dy-20200629&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c9dfd39373-a1a9bf577f-44992633

Moon craters honouring Nazis to be renamed

A task force has recommended that the International Astronomical Union rename two craters on the far side of the Moon that had been dedicated to fervent Nazis Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark. The two Nobel laureates were “largely responsible for the absurd idea that there was an ‘Aryan physics’”, writes science writer Philip Ball, whose book on German physics under the Nazis was used to inform the decision. The dedications had been apparently done without knowledge of the physicists’ anti-Semitism, which targeted Jewish scientists and Albert Einstein in particular. “Far from making me troubled that I am colluding in expunging history,” writes Ball, the episode shows that “public monuments are more often a consequence of, rather than a protection against, historical amnesia”.

Prospect | 7 min read