67 Facts About Hans Bethe

Hans Albrecht Bethe was a German-American theoretical physicist who made major contributions to nuclear physics, astrophysics, quantum electrodynamics, and solid-state physics, and who won the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis.

For most of his career, Bethe was a professor at Cornell University.

Hans Bethe later campaigned with Albert Einstein and the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists against nuclear testing and the nuclear arms race.

Hans Bethe helped persuade the Kennedy and Nixon administrations to sign, respectively, the 1963 Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

Hans Bethe's father accepted a position as professor and director of the Institute of Physiology at the University of Kiel in 1912, and the family moved into the director's apartment at the institute.

Hans Bethe's education was interrupted in 1916, when he contracted tuberculosis, and he was sent to Bad Kreuznach to recuperate.

Hans Bethe attended the Goethe-Gymnasium again for his final three years of secondary schooling, from 1922 to 1924.

The instruction in physics was poor, and while there were distinguished mathematicians in Frankfurt such as Carl Ludwig Siegel and Otto Szasz, Hans Bethe disliked their approaches, which presented mathematics without reference to the other sciences.

Hans Bethe found that he was a poor experimentalist who destroyed his lab coat by spilling sulfuric acid on it, but he found the advanced physics taught by the associate professor, Walter Gerlach, more interesting.

Hans Bethe entered the University of Munich in April 1926, where Sommerfeld took him on as a student on Meissner's recommendation.

When Hans Bethe arrived, Sommerfeld had just received Erwin Schrodinger's papers on wave mechanics.

Hans Bethe later recalled that he became too ambitious, and, in pursuit of greater accuracy, his calculations became unnecessarily complicated.

Hans Bethe's father had met Vera Congehl earlier that year and married her in 1929.

Hans Bethe did not find the work in Frankfurt very stimulating, and in 1929 he accepted an offer from Ewald at the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart.

Hans Bethe submitted this paper for his habilitation in 1930.

In 1930, Hans Bethe chose to do postdoctoral work at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in England, where he worked under the supervision of Ralph Fowler.

At the request of Patrick Blackett, who was working with cloud chambers, Hans Bethe created a relativistic version of the Hans Bethe formula.

Hans Bethe was known for his sense of humor, and with Guido Beck and Wolfgang Riezler, two other postdoctoral research fellows, created a hoax paper On the Quantum Theory of the Temperature of Absolute Zero where he calculated the fine structure constant from the absolute zero temperature in Celsius units.

Hans Bethe was greatly impressed by Fermi and regretted that he had not gone to Rome first.

Hans Bethe developed the Hans Bethe ansatz, a method for finding the exact solutions for the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of certain one-dimensional quantum many-body models.

Hans Bethe was influenced by Fermi's simplicity and Sommerfeld's rigor in approaching problems and these qualities influenced his own later research.

The Rockefeller Foundation offered an extension of Hans Bethe's fellowship, allowing him to return to Italy in 1932.

Since Bethe was fluent in English, Sommerfeld had Bethe supervise all his English-speaking postdoctoral fellows, including Lloyd P Smith from Cornell University.

Hans Bethe accepted a request from Karl Scheel to write an article for the Handbuch der Physik on the quantum mechanics of hydrogen and helium.

Hans Bethe was then asked by Sommerfeld to help him with the handbuch article on electrons in metals.

Hans Bethe took a very new field and provided a clear, coherent, and complete coverage of it.

In 1932, Bethe accepted an appointment as an assistant professor at the University of Tubingen, where Hans Geiger was the professor of experimental physics.

Hans Bethe left Germany in 1933, moving to England after receiving an offer for a position as lecturer at the University of Manchester for a year through Sommerfeld's connection to William Lawrence Bragg.

Hans Bethe moved in with his friend Rudolf Peierls and Peierls' wife Genia.

Hans Bethe had already accepted a fellowship for a year to work with Nevill Mott at the University of Bristol for a semester, but Cornell agreed to let him start in the spring of 1935.

Hans Bethe arrived in the United States in February 1935, and joined the faculty at Cornell University on a salary of $3,000.

Hans Bethe's appointment was part of a deliberate effort on the part of the new head of its physics department, Roswell Clifton Gibbs, to move into nuclear physics.

Gibbs moved to prevent Hans Bethe from being poached by having him appointed as a regular assistant professor in 1936, with an assurance that promotion to professor would soon follow.

Together with Bacher and Livingston, Hans Bethe published a series of three articles, which summarized most of what was known on the subject of nuclear physics until that time, an account that became known informally as "Hans Bethe's Bible".

On March 17,1938, Hans Bethe attended the Carnegie Institute and George Washington University's fourth annual Washington Conference of Theoretical Physics.

Hans Bethe initially declined the invitation to attend, because the conference's topic, stellar energy generation, did not interest him, but Teller persuaded him to go.

When he returned to Cornell, Hans Bethe studied the relevant nuclear reactions and reaction cross sections, leading to his discovery of the carbon-nitrogen-oxygen cycle :.

Hans Bethe married Rose Ewald, the daughter of Paul Ewald, on September 13,1939, in a simple civil ceremony.

Hans Bethe had emigrated to the United States and was a student at Duke University and they met while Bethe was lecturing there in 1937.

Hans Bethe became a naturalized citizen of the United States in March 1941.

Hans Bethe worked on a theory of armor penetration, which was immediately classified by the army, thus making it impossible for Bethe to access further research on the theory.

Hans Bethe later remarked in 1968 on the apparent contradiction in his stance, having first opposed the development of the weapon and later helping to create it:.

In 1954, Bethe testified on behalf of J Robert Oppenheimer during the Oppenheimer security hearing.

Specifically, Hans Bethe argued that Oppenheimer's stances against developing the hydrogen bomb in the late 1940s had not hindered its development, a topic which was seen as a key motivating factor behind the hearing.

Hans Bethe Kramers proposed renormalization as a solution, but no one knew how to do the calculation.

Hans Bethe managed to perform the calculation on the train from New York to Schenectady, where he was working for General Electric.

Hans Bethe did so by realising that it was a non-relativistic process, which greatly simplified the calculation.

Hans Bethe's paper, published in the Physical Review in August 1947, was only three pages long and contained just twelve mathematical equations, but was enormously influential.

Hans Bethe believed that the atomic nucleus was like a quantum liquid drop.

Hans Bethe investigated the nuclear matter problem by considering the work conducted by Keith Brueckner on perturbation theory.

Hans Bethe then used these techniques to examine the neutron stars, which have densities similar to those of nuclei.

Hans Bethe continued to do research on supernovae, neutron stars, black holes, and other problems in theoretical astrophysics into his late nineties.

At age 85, Hans Bethe wrote an important article about the solar neutrino problem, in which he helped establish the conversion mechanism for electron neutrinos into muon neutrinos proposed by Stanislav Mikheyev, Alexei Smirnov, and Lincoln Wolfenstein to explain a vexing discrepancy between theory and experiment.

Hans Bethe argued that physics beyond the Standard Model was required to understand the solar neutrino problem, because it presumed that neutrinos have no mass, and therefore, cannot metamorphosize into each other; whereas the MSW effect required this to occur.

Hans Bethe hoped that corroborating evidence would be found by the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Ontario by his 90th birthday, but he did not get the call from SNO until June 2001, when he was nearly 95.

Hans Bethe was one of the primary voices in the scientific community behind the signing of the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty prohibiting further atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons.

In 1995, at the age of 88, Hans Bethe wrote an open letter calling on all scientists to "cease and desist" from working on any aspect of nuclear weapons development and manufacture.

When Oppenheimer died, Oppie's long-time friend, Hans Bethe, assumed the mantle of the scientist of conscience in this country.

Hans Bethe loved the outdoors and was an enthusiastic hiker all his life, exploring the Alps and the Rockies.

Hans Bethe died in his home in Ithaca, New York, on March 6,2005, of congestive heart failure.

Hans Bethe was survived by his wife, Rose Ewald Bethe, and their two children.

Hans Bethe received numerous honors and awards in his lifetime and afterward.

Hans Bethe was awarded the Max Planck Medal in 1955, the Franklin Medal in 1959, the Royal Astronomical Society Eddington Medal and the United States Atomic Energy Commission Enrico Fermi Award in 1961, the Rumford Prize in 1963, the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1967, the National Medal of Science in 1975, the Oersted Medal in 1993, the Bruce Medal in 2001, and posthumously in 2005, the Benjamin Franklin Medal for Distinguished Achievement in the Sciences by the American Philosophical Society.

Hans Bethe was elected Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1957, and he gave the 1993 Bakerian Lecture at the Royal Society on the Mechanism of Supernovae.

Similarly named after him is the Hans Bethe Center, 322 Fourth Street NE, Washington, DC, home to the Council for a Livable World, where Bethe was a longtime board member, as well as the Bethe Center for Theoretical Physics at University of Bonn in Germany.

An asteroid, 30828 Hans Bethe, that was discovered in 1990 was named after him.

The American Physical Society Hans Bethe Prize was named after him as well.