Biographical Memoirs Volume 91 (2009) / Chapter Skim
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HANS ALBRECHT BETHE
HANS ALBRECHT BETHE
Pages 30-57
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From page 30... ...
Courtesy of Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections Cornell University Library.
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From page 31... ...
He was universally admired for his scientific achievement, his integrity, fairness, and for his deeply felt concern for the progress of science and humanity that made him the "conscience of science." Bethe studied theoretical physics with many of the greatest minds within the physics community, including Sommerfeld, Ewald, and Bohr. His Jewish background made a career in Germany all but impossible, and after a brief spell in England between 1933 and 1935, he emigrated from Germany to the United States.
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From page 32... ...
Hans Bethe showed an early interest in numbers, discovering for himself the basic principles of arithmetic, including the decimal system. He was close to his father and they often talked about scientific matters.
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In 1926 Arnold Sommerfeld was the most influential physics teacher in the world, his recent prize pupils having been the future Nobel Prize winners Wolfgang Pauli and Werner Heisenberg. Sommerfeld worked in every area of theoretical physics and his lectures formed one of the best introductions to many branches of physics.
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From page 34... ...
The theory of x-ray diffraction had initially been formulated in 1912 by Max von Laue based on suggestions by Paul Ewald, and had been demonstrated in famous experiments by Walther Friedrich and Paul Knipping (Friedrich, Knipping and Laue, 1913)
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From page 35... ...
It established the theory that has been of great importance for the interpretation of experiments using cosmic rays and particle accelerators. Thus, by the age of 24 Bethe had already left his mark in his chosen field of scientific research with thorough, insightful, and innovative contributions of long-lasting impact.
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From page 36... ...
In contrast with Sommerfeld, whose method was to begin by inserting the data of a problem into an appropriate mathematical equation and solving the equation quantitatively according to the strictest mathematical formalism for those specific data, for Fermi the mathematical solution was more a confirmation of his understanding of a problem than the basis for its solution. Although Fermi's main interest during the period of Bethe's visit was low-energy neutron scattering, he and Bethe coauthored a paper comparing three methods of treating relativistic electron-electron interactions (1932)
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From page 37... ...
On the occasion of a visit to Rutherford's Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, James Chadwick acquainted them with an experiment carried out with a bright young graduate student Maurice Goldhaber on the photodisintegration of the deuteron (then called diplon)
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From page 38... ...
Four new appointments were made in just two years: Lyman Parratt in X-ray spectroscopy, and three men in the very new field of nuclear physics: Stanley Livingston, who had just helped Ernest Lawrence build the world's first cyclotron, the young yet experienced experimentalist Robert F Bacher, and to complete the team of builder, experimentalist, and theorist, Hans Bethe.
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From page 39... ...
THE CARBON CYCLE The fourth Washington Conference, jointly organized by Merle Tuve of the Carnegie Institution and John Fleming of George Washington University in March 1938 was devoted
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From page 40... ...
The question of energy production in larger stars remained unsolved. The proton-proton reaction did not predict this accurately, since the rate of the reaction increases slowly as the temperatures rise, in contrast with the known phenomenon in larger stars where the core temperatures increase slowly with increasing mass, but the luminosity increases very rapidly.
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From page 41... ...
The years immediately preceding the Second World War were an exciting time for Hans Bethe scientifically, and they were also a happy time personally. His mother arrived in the United States safely in 1939, and in September of that year, he married Rose Ewald, the daughter of his former mentor at Stuttgart.
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From page 42... ...
In 1942 while working on the radar project, Bethe participated in a summer study group at Berkeley, organized by Robert Oppenheimer, which led to the creation of the Los Alamos Laboratory in 1943. Like many others, Bethe joined the Manhattan Project out of fear that Nazi Germany might be developing a fission bomb.
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QED AND THE LAMB SHIFT CALCULATION After the end of the Second World War, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences sponsored a series of conferences in theoretical physics.
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Hans Bethe, on a relatively brief train journey from New York to Schenectady after the conference, made use of these ideas to calculate quantum mechanically the level shift for a nonrelativistic electron and found substantial agreement with the experimental value. The Lamb Shift calculations were a fine example of what I (G.E.B.)
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From page 45... ...
He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1944. The award of the 1947 Henry Draper Medal was followed by the Max Planck Medal in 1955, the Ben Franklin Medal in 1959, the Enrico Fermi Award and the Eddington Medal in 1961, the Rumford Prize in 1963, the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1967, the Order Pour le Merite for Arts and Sciences of the German Government in 1984, the Los Alamos National Laboratory Medal and the Bruce Medal in 2001, and -- awarded posthumously -- the Benjamin Franklin Medal, 2005, to name but the most important honors.
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From page 46... ...
It is indicative of Bethe's continual grappling with moral issues that on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Hiroshima he addressed the scientists assembled at Los Alamos to convince them that one should not work on the further improvement of nuclear weapons. Given the changed context brought about by the collapse of the Soviet Union he urged that fellow scientists collectively take a Hippocratic oath not to work on designing new nuclear weapons.
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From page 47... ...
His approach, based on a diagrammatic expansion of perturbation theory in a series ordered by the number of interacting particles, had "Hans Bethe" written all over it. In one substantial paper (1956)
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From page 48... ...
. As in other scientific contexts, analytic solutions to specific problems were a source of additional insight for Hans Bethe.
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ASTROPHYSICS AGAIN I (G.E.B.) had got to know Hans Bethe in the 1950s, when I was a lodger -- at Birmingham -- at the home of his close friend from Munich days, Rudolf Peierls.
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I proposed to work out a theory of supernovae and while at Copenhagen Bethe read through the existing literature on the core collapse of massive stars. He quickly realized that all supernovae calculations contained an error.
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From page 51... ...
Usually we agreed on the results. When asked once how he wanted to be remembered, after some puzzlement at the question, he said "as a scientist." It would therefore have pleased him that in 2008 a younger generation of physicists in Germany, where the immediate post-war generation repudiated him as one of the evil geniuses of the atomic bomb, wished to perpetuate his name through the Bethe Center for Theoretical Physics at Bonn University and the Hans Bethe-Strasse in the neighborhood of the natural science campus of the University of Frankfurt am Main.
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From page 52... ...
In Hans Bethe and His Physics, eds.
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From page 53... ...
1937. Die Theorie des Kerninnern und die Entwicklung der Sterne.
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From page 54... ...
5:325-400. 1931 Zur Theorie der Metalle.
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54:862. 1939 Energy production in stars.
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From page 56... ...
Paul Peter Ewald. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 34:135–176
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