I was Hitler’s best friend
QUESTION
What became of Adolf Hitler’s teenage friend August Kubizek?
AUGUST KUBIZEK met Adolf Hitler in 1904 when the teenagers were competing for standing room at the opera in Linz. The young Hitler was an avid fan of Wagnerian opera, which he attended at every opportunity.
For the next four years, the pair were inseparable. ‘I lived side by side with Adolf,’ said Kubizek.
‘In these decisive years, when he grew from a boy of 15 to a young man, Adolf confided to me things that he had told to no one, not even his mother.’
When Kubizek wanted to study music rather than the family trade of upholstery, Hitler persuaded his friend’s father to allow him to go to Vienna. From 1908, the two young men shared a small room on No. 29 Stumpergasse.
A fracture in their friendship was caused when Kubizek was admitted to the Academy of Music while Hitler was twice rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts, a blow that would affect him all his life.
According to Kubizek, Hitler took the rejection extremely badly: ‘Choking with his catalogue of hates, he would pour his fury over everything, against mankind in general, who did not understand him, who did not appreciate him and by whom he was persecuted and cheated.’
Hitler became increasingly difficult to live with. He flew into a jealous fury when Kubizek brought a girl back to their room.
On November 20, 1908, Kubizek returned home to No. 29 Stumpergasse to find that his friend Hitler had disappeared, leaving no forwarding address.
Kubizek passed his exams and soon after became conductor of the orchestra of the Austrian town of Marburg.
In 1914, he married Anna Funke and they had three sons: Augustin, Karl Maria and Rudolf.
At the outbreak of World War I, he joined Austro-Hungarian Infantry Regiment No. 2. Wounded in 1915 fighting the Russians on the Galician front, he was not fit to return to action until 1918.
After the war, Kubizek found little work as a musician.
He briefly conducted a six-piece band in a Vienna cinema to provide the ‘musical illustration’ for silent films.
He found little satisfaction in this, so took a job in the municipal council of Eferding, which is not far from his birthplace. In 1933, Kubizek sent Hitler a letter congratulating him on becoming Chancellor of Germany.
Five years later, on April 8, 1938, the friends met again after 30 years of separation.
The Fuhrer, who had just annexed Austria, offered his old friend a job as a conductor under his powerful patronage, but Kubizek declined.
Hitler insisted on financing Kubizek’s sons’ education at the Anton Bruckner Conservatory and hired him to write two short propaganda booklets about their early life.
Kubizek remained in local government in Eferding, except for a short time in US detention in 1945.
When repeatedly asked why he hadn’t killed Hitler, he replied: ‘Because he was my friend.’
His book, The Young Hitler I Knew, was published in 1953, and Kubizek retired as head of the council the following year. He died in 1956, aged 68.
Adam Foxton, Bournemouth.
QUESTION
In physics, what is the significance of a point particle?
A POINT particle doesn’t have any significance other than as a mathematical convenience.
Physics students are familiar with shorthand phrases in exam questions, such as ‘assume a frictionless surface . . . a perfect vacuum . . . a massless pendulum rod’. These are ways of simplifying a potentially complex calculation.
A real pendulum has a long rod with a large, heavy weight on one end. If a physicist wanted to calculate the time of its swing, this would involve a complex algorithm and what would be an awful lot of computing power.
However, if we assume a massless rod and that all the mass of the pendulum is concentrated at a point at the centre of gravity then the calculation can be done with just a pencil and paper.
Many calculations involving elementary particles are simplified by assuming a point particle.
A proton is not a point particle because it is composed of three quarks, but it can be assumed as being such.
When the simplified equation has been generated and the figures need working out, it can still look a bit daunting.
This leads to another shorthand much used by tutors: ‘It is left as an exercise to the student.’ Keith Matthews, Ferndown, Dorset.
QUESTION
Why do sixcylinder petrol engines sound so different to those with four cylinders?
EACH engine type, or configuration, has a characteristic sound.
In four-stroke, or Otto cycle engines, which are in relatively common use, a combustion stroke occurs once, for a single cylinder engine, for every two revolutions of the crankshaft itself.
The sound of a single cylinder, four-stroke engine is a characteristic ‘thump thump’ at tick-over.
This is the typical sound of a small boat engine or some motorcycles because only one revolution of two is producing work.
As the number of cylinders is increased, the work increases for each revolution.
A typical four-cylinder engine will have two cylinders per revolution producing power while a sixcylinder engine will have three cylinders producing power for each crankshaft revolution.
As the angles of the cranks relative to the shaft for a six-cylinder engine are set at 120 degrees, the times between each cylinder firing are closer to each other than on a four-cylinder engine, where the cranks are angled at 180 degrees.
Laurence Cooper, Swansea.
QUESTION Is it possible to have triple or even quadruple rainbows?
A PREVIOUS answer about double rainbows described how each droplet of water acts as a tiny prism that disperses the light and reflects it back to your eye.
Since an ever-decreasing fraction of light will undergo additional internal reflection instead of re-entering the air, a single drop of water can, in theory, give an infinite number of rainbows.
However, the higher the order, the fainter the rainbow. A secondary rainbow caused by light reflected twice inside the raindrops is often visible.
As astronomer Edmund Halley predicted, the third arc is centred on the Sun, unlike the primary and secondary rainbows, which are centred on the anti-solar point. The glare of the Sun means that it is difficult to see and it wasn’t photographed until 2011.
The fourth order rainbow is close to the tertiary one, but with reversed colours.
Rainbows with light reflecting 13 times before re-entering the air have been observed in a single drop of water suspended from the end of a wire in a laboratory. Rainbows reflecting 19 times have been observed in thin, falling streams of water in lab conditions.