Professor Albert Einstein and seven other leading scientists are pictured at a luncheon given by the emergency committee of atomic scientists. Left to right: Harold C. Urey, Albert Einstein, Selig Hecht, Victor F.Weissko, Leo S. Szilard, Hans A. Bethe, Thorfin R. Hogness, and Philip M. Morse.
Gallery of Hans Bethe
1950
Presiding at a physicist press conference, Cornell's Dr. Hans A. Bethe declares total secrecy for the H bomb. (Photo by Ralph Morse/The LIFE Picture Collection)
Gallery of Hans Bethe
1950
Dr. Hans A. Bethe reading a statement at Eleanor Roosevelt's television tea while David E. Lilienthal, head of the Atomic Energy Commission, registers disagreement. At far right is physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. (Photo by Leonard McCombe/The LIFE Images Collection)
Gallery of Hans Bethe
1950
New York City, New York, United States
A group of American Scientists gathered at Columbia University for a meeting of the American Physical Society, issued a joint statement, that in their opinion "No nation has the right to use such a bomb" as the hydrogen bomb, "No matter how righteous its cause. They said it is no longer a weapon of war, but a means of the extermination of whole populations. The assembled scientists are C.B. Pegram, S.K. Allison, B. Rossi, Dr. Hans Bethe, K.T. Bainbridge, C.C Lauritzen, V.F. Weiskopf, F.W. Loomis, R.B. Brode, M.G. White, F. Seitz.
Gallery of Hans Bethe
1950
Hans Bethe, consultant and former adviser to President Eisenhower's Scientific Advisory Committee, testified that the detection system proposed at Geneva could be improved.
Gallery of Hans Bethe
1950
Hans Albrecht Bethe. (Photo by Photo 12/Universal Images Group)
Gallery of Hans Bethe
1955
German-American nuclear physicist Hans A Bethe deep in thought as he sits surrounded by book-lined shelves in a library, circa 1955. (Photo by Marvin Koner/CORBIS/Corbis)
Gallery of Hans Bethe
1958
Scientists Hans A. Bethe, Edward M. Purcell, Hugh L. Dryden, and Herbert F. York attending a Science Advisory Committee meeting. (Photo by Paul Schutzer/The LIFE Picture Collection)
Gallery of Hans Bethe
1960
Physicist Hans Bethe in Front of Fireplace (Photo by CORBIS/Corbis)
Gallery of Hans Bethe
1961
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20500, United States
Dr. Hans A. Bethe, the Alsatian physicist who helped develop the United States atomic arsenal, holds the Enrico Fermi Award (a gold medal) after it was presented to him by President Kennedy at the White House.
Gallery of Hans Bethe
1962
German-born scientist Hans Bethe speaking in serious portrait during a classroom lecture. (Photo by Jacob Lofman/Pix Inc./The LIFE Images Collection)
Gallery of Hans Bethe
1967
Theoretical physicist Hans Albrecht Bethe giving a lecture. (Photo by Keystone)
Gallery of Hans Bethe
1967
Hötorget 8, 103 87 Stockholm, Sweden
Eight Nobel Prize winners at the Stockholm Concert Hall, 10th December 1967. From left to right, they are Ronald Norrish, Manfred Eigen, and George Porter and Hans Bethe, Ragnar Granit, Haldan Hartline, and George Wald, and Miguel Angel Asturias. (Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive)
Gallery of Hans Bethe
1967
Hötorget 8, 103 87 Stockholm, Sweden
King Gustav Adolf of Sweden presents the Nobel Prize for Physics to Hans A. Bethe of the United States at the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony at the Stockholm Concert Hall on December 10, 1967.
Gallery of Hans Bethe
1967
Hötorget 8, 103 87 Stockholm, Sweden
All of the 1967 prize winners appear together during the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony in the Concert Hall.
Gallery of Hans Bethe
1968
Hans Bethe with Boyce McDaniel in the tunnel of the Cornell Electron Storage Ring, 1968.
Professor Albert Einstein and seven other leading scientists are pictured at a luncheon given by the emergency committee of atomic scientists. Left to right: Harold C. Urey, Albert Einstein, Selig Hecht, Victor F.Weissko, Leo S. Szilard, Hans A. Bethe, Thorfin R. Hogness, and Philip M. Morse.
Presiding at a physicist press conference, Cornell's Dr. Hans A. Bethe declares total secrecy for the H bomb. (Photo by Ralph Morse/The LIFE Picture Collection)
Dr. Hans A. Bethe reading a statement at Eleanor Roosevelt's television tea while David E. Lilienthal, head of the Atomic Energy Commission, registers disagreement. At far right is physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. (Photo by Leonard McCombe/The LIFE Images Collection)
A group of American Scientists gathered at Columbia University for a meeting of the American Physical Society, issued a joint statement, that in their opinion "No nation has the right to use such a bomb" as the hydrogen bomb, "No matter how righteous its cause. They said it is no longer a weapon of war, but a means of the extermination of whole populations. The assembled scientists are C.B. Pegram, S.K. Allison, B. Rossi, Dr. Hans Bethe, K.T. Bainbridge, C.C Lauritzen, V.F. Weiskopf, F.W. Loomis, R.B. Brode, M.G. White, F. Seitz.
Hans Bethe, consultant and former adviser to President Eisenhower's Scientific Advisory Committee, testified that the detection system proposed at Geneva could be improved.
German-American nuclear physicist Hans A Bethe deep in thought as he sits surrounded by book-lined shelves in a library, circa 1955. (Photo by Marvin Koner/CORBIS/Corbis)
Scientists Hans A. Bethe, Edward M. Purcell, Hugh L. Dryden, and Herbert F. York attending a Science Advisory Committee meeting. (Photo by Paul Schutzer/The LIFE Picture Collection)
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20500, United States
Dr. Hans A. Bethe, the Alsatian physicist who helped develop the United States atomic arsenal, holds the Enrico Fermi Award (a gold medal) after it was presented to him by President Kennedy at the White House.
Eight Nobel Prize winners at the Stockholm Concert Hall, 10th December 1967. From left to right, they are Ronald Norrish, Manfred Eigen, and George Porter and Hans Bethe, Ragnar Granit, Haldan Hartline, and George Wald, and Miguel Angel Asturias. (Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive)
King Gustav Adolf of Sweden presents the Nobel Prize for Physics to Hans A. Bethe of the United States at the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony at the Stockholm Concert Hall on December 10, 1967.
(This compact treatment of the basic theory of nuclear for...)
This compact treatment of the basic theory of nuclear forces, structures, and reactions bases its explanations almost entirely on the familiar results of nonrelativistic quantum theory.
(This classic of modern physics includes a vast array of a...)
This classic of modern physics includes a vast array of approximation methods, mathematical tricks, and physical pictures that are also useful in the application of quantum mechanics to other fields. Students and professionals should find it an essential reference for calculations pertaining to hydrogen-like and helium-like atoms and their comparison with experimental results. In-depth explorations of the Dirac theory of the electron and of radiative effects include brief accounts of relevant experiments.
(In 1947, Bethe Edited the Los Alamos Report "Blast Wave,"...)
In 1947, Bethe Edited the Los Alamos Report "Blast Wave," one of his most cited works among shock physicists, which describes how a nuclear weapon blast wave develops over time and distance. This report also contains contributions by John von Neumann, John Magee, Klaus Fuchs, and other prominent scientists.
(Essays discuss the development of the atomic bomb, arms c...)
Essays discuss the development of the atomic bomb, arms control, the value of a nuclear freeze, the ethics of science, nuclear power, astrophysics, and fellow scientists.
(Graduate students in both theoretical and experimental ph...)
Graduate students in both theoretical and experimental physics will find this third edition of Intermediate Quantum Mechanics, refined and updated in 1986, indispensable. The first part of the book deals with the theory of atomic structure, while the second and third parts deal with the relativistic wave equations and introduction to field theory, making Intermediate Quantum Mechanics more complete than any other single-volume work on the subject.
Hans Albrecht Bethe was a German-born American theoretical physicist who helped shape quantum physics and increased the understanding of the atomic processes responsible for the properties of matter. He received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1967 for his work on the production of energy in stars.
Background
Hans Bethe was born in 1906 in Strasbourg, France (at that time it was a part of the German Empire) to his parents Albrecht and Ella. His father, a physiologist at the University of Strasbourg, was a Protestant and his mother Jewish. He was their only child.
Education
Bethe started reading at age four and began writing at about the same age. His numerical and mathematical abilities also manifested themselves early. He attended the Gymnasium in Frankfurt from 1915. His mathematics teacher at the gymnasium recognized his talents and encouraged him to continue studies in mathematics and the physical sciences. Bethe graduated from the gymnasium in the spring of 1924.
After completing two years of studies at the University of Frankfurt, he was advised by one of his teachers to go to the University of Munich and study with Arnold Sommerfeld.
It was in Munich that Bethe discovered his exceptional proficiency in physics. Sommerfeld indicated to him that he was among the very best students who had studied with him, and these included Wolfgang Pauli and Werner Heisenberg. Bethe obtained a doctorate in 1928 with a thesis on electron diffraction in crystals. During 1930, as a Rockefeller Foundation fellow, Bethe spent a semester at the University of Cambridge under the aegis of Ralph Fowler and a semester at the University of Rome working with Enrico Fermi.
Bethe’s craftsmanship was an amalgam of what he had learned from Sommerfeld and from Fermi, combining the best of both: the thoroughness and rigor of Sommerfeld and the clarity and simplicity of Fermi. This craftsmanship was displayed in full force in the many reviews that Bethe wrote. His two book-length reviews in the 1933 Handbuch der Physik - the first with Sommerfeld on solid-state physics and the second on the quantum theory of one- and two-electron systems - exhibited his remarkable powers of synthesis. Along with a review on nuclear physics in Reviews of Modern Physics (1936-1937), these works were instant classics. All of Bethe’s reviews were syntheses of the fields under review, giving them coherence and unity while charting the paths to be taken in addressing new problems. They usually contained much new material that Bethe had worked out in their preparation.
In the fall of 1932, Bethe obtained an appointment at the University of Tübingen as an acting assistant professor of theoretical physics. In April 1933, after Adolf Hitler’s accession to power, he was dismissed because his maternal grandparents were Jews. Sommerfeld was able to help him by awarding him a fellowship for the summer of 1933, and he got William Lawrence Bragg to invite him to the University of Manchester, England, for the following academic year. Bethe then went to the University of Bristol for the 1934 fall semester before accepting a position at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. He arrived at Cornell in February 1935, and he stayed there for the rest of his life.
Bethe came to the United States at a time when the American physics community was undergoing enormous growth. The Washington Conferences on Theoretical Physics were paradigmatic of the meetings organized to assimilate the insights quantum mechanics was giving to many fields, especially atomic and molecular physics and the emerging field of nuclear physics. Bethe attended the 1935 and 1937 Washington Conferences, but he agreed to participate in the 1938 conference on stellar energy generation only after repeated urgings by Edward Teller. As a result of what he learned at the latter conference, Bethe was able to give definitive answers to the problem of energy generation in stars. By stipulating and analyzing the nuclear reactions responsible for the phenomenon, he explained how stars could continue to burn for billions of years. His 1939 Physical Review paper on energy generation in stars created the field of nuclear astrophysics and led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize.
During World War II Bethe first worked on problems in radar, spending a year at the Radiation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1943 he joined the Los Alamos Laboratory (now the Los Alamos National Laboratory) in New Mexico as the head of its theoretical division. He and the division were part of the Manhattan Project, and they made crucial contributions to the feasibility and design of the uranium and the plutonium atomic bombs. The years at Los Alamos changed his life.
In the aftermath of the development of these fission weapons, Bethe became deeply involved with investigating the feasibility of developing fusion bombs, hoping to prove that no terrestrial mechanism could accomplish the task. He believed their development to be immoral. When the Teller-Ulam mechanism for igniting a fusion reaction was advanced in 1951 and the possibility of a hydrogen bomb, or H-bomb, became a reality, Bethe helped to design it. He believed that the Soviets would likewise be able to build one and that only a balance of terror would prevent their use.
As a result of these activities, Bethe became deeply occupied with what he called “political physics,” an attempt to educate the public and politicians about the consequences of the existence of nuclear weapons. He became a relentless champion of nuclear arms control, writing many essays (collected in The Road from Los Alamos [1991]). He also became deeply committed to making peaceful applications of nuclear power economical and safe. Throughout his life, Bethe was a staunch advocate of nuclear power, defending it as an answer to the inevitable exhaustion of fossil fuels.
Bethe served on numerous advisory committees to the United States government, including the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC). As a member of PSAC, he helped persuade President Dwight D. Eisenhower to commit the United States to ban atmospheric nuclear tests. (The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which banned atmospheric nuclear testing, was finally ratified in 1963.)
Throughout the political activism that marked his later life, Bethe never abandoned his scientific researches. Until well into his 90s, he made important contributions at the frontiers of physics and astrophysics. He helped elucidate the properties of neutrinos and explained the observed rate of neutrino emission by the Sun. With the American physicist Gerald Brown, he worked to understand why massive old stars can suddenly become supernovas.
Hans Bethe was raised by religious parents but described himself as an atheist in later life.
Politics
Politically, Bethe was the liberal counterpoint (and proud of it) to Edward Teller, the Hungarian physicist and strong conservative who played a dominant role in developing the hydrogen bomb. It brought to earth a more furious version of the fusion reactions in stars, and Dr. Bethe opposed its development as immoral. For more than a half-century, he championed many forms of arms control and nuclear disarmament, becoming a hero of the liberal intelligentsia.
As a member of the President's Science Advisory Committee, starting in 1956, he became a driving force behind the world's first and most successful arms control pact, the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, which confined nuclear tests beneath the earth.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Bethe lent his growing prestige to fight the government's plans to deploy antimissile weapons. Having studied the issue for President Dwight D. Eisenhower, he was convinced that all such systems could be easily defeated.
Views
Bethe’s main work is concerned with the theory of atomic nuclei. Together with Peierls, he developed a theory of the deuteron in 1934 which he extended in 1949. He resolved some contradictions in the nuclear mass scale in 1935. He studied the theory of nuclear reactions in 1935-1938, predicting many reaction cross-sections. In connection with this work, he developed Bohr’s theory of the compound nucleus in a more quantitative fashion. This work and also the existing knowledge on nuclear theory and experimental results were summarized in three articles in the Reviews of Modern Physics which for many years served as a textbook for nuclear physicists.
His work on nuclear reactions led Bethe to the discovery of the reactions which supply the energy in the stars. The most important nuclear reaction in the brilliant stars is the carbon-nitrogen cycle, while the sun and fainter stars use mostly the proton-proton reaction. Bethe’s main achievement in this connection was the exclusion of other possible nuclear reactions. The Nobel Prize was given for this work, as well as his work on nuclear reactions in general.
In 1955 Bethe returned to the theory of nuclei, emphasizing a different phase. He has worked since then on the theory of nuclear matter whose aim it is to explain the properties of atomic nuclei in terms of the forces acting between nucleons.
Before his work on nuclear physics, Bethe’s main attention was given to atomic physics and collision theory. On the former subject, he wrote a review article in Handbuch der Physik in which he filled in the gaps of the existing knowledge, and which is still up-to-date. In collision theory, he developed a simple and powerful theory of inelastic collisions between fast particles and atoms which he has used to determine the stopping power of matter for fast charged particles, thus providing a tool to nuclear physicists. Turning to more energetic collisions, he calculated with Heitler the bremsstrahlung emitted by relativistic electrons and the production of electron pairs by high energy gamma rays.
Bethe also did some work on solid-state theory. He discussed the splitting of atomic energy levels when an atom is inserted into a crystal, he did some work on the theory of metals, and especially he developed a theory of the order and disorder in alloys.
In 1947, Bethe was the first to explain the Lamb-shift in the hydrogen spectrum, and he thus laid the foundation for the modern development of quantum electrodynamics. Later on, he worked with a large number of collaborators on the scattering of pi mesons and on their production by electromagnetic radiation.
In 1972 Bethe’s cogent and persuasive arguments helped prevent the deployment of antiballistic missile systems. He was influential in opposing President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, arguing that a space-based laser defense system could be easily countered and that it would lead to further arms escalation. By virtue of these activities, and his general comportment, Bethe became the science community’s conscience. It was indicative of Bethe’s constant grappling with moral issues that in 1995 he urged fellow scientists to collectively take a "Hippocratic oath" not to work on designing new nuclear weapons.
Throughout life, Hans Bethe remained a staunch advocate of nuclear power, defending it as an answer to inevitable fossil-fuel shortages.
His ultimate dream, he said, was for nations to cut their nuclear arsenals to a few hundred arms or less. "Then," added Bethe, a survivor of Hitler and Mussolini, "even if statesmen go crazy again, as they used to be, the use of these weapons will not destroy civilization."
His personal philosophy seemed deceptively simple: Science and technology, while good friends of great importance, cannot save humanity. Instead, he taught that only humane reasoning and the struggle to foster just human relationships would keep civilization from using the accomplishments of science to destroy itself.
Quotations:
"When I started participating in thermonuclear work in the summer of 1950, I was hoping to prove that thermonuclear weapons could not be made. If this could have been proved convincingly, this would, of course, have applied to both the Russians and ourselves and would have given greater security to both sides than we can now ever achieve. It was possible to entertain such hope until the spring of 1951 when it suddenly became clear that it was no longer tenable."
"If we fight a war and win it with H-bombs, what history will remember is not the ideals we were fighting for but the methods we used to accomplish them. These methods will be compared to the warfare of Genghis Khan who ruthlessly killed every last inhabitant of Persia."
''Today the arms race is a long-range problem. The Second World War was a short-range problem, and in the short-range, I think it was essential to making the atomic bomb. However, not much thought was given to the time 'after the bomb.' At first, the work was too absorbing, and we wanted to get the job done. But I think that once it was made it had its own impulse - its own motion that could not be stopped.''
"Today we are rightly in an era of disarmament and dismantlement of nuclear weapons. But in some countries, nuclear weapons development still continues. Whether and when the various Nations of the World can agree to stop this is uncertain. But individual scientists can still influence this process by withholding their skills. Accordingly, I call on all scientists in all countries to cease and desist from work creating, developing, improving and manufacturing further nuclear weapons - and, for that matter, other weapons of potential mass destruction such as chemical and biological weapons."
''Stars have a life cycle much like animals. They get born, they grow, they go through a definite internal development, and finally, they die, to give back the material of which they are made so that new stars may live.''
''No one any longer pays attention to - if I may call it - the spirit of physics, the idea of discovery, the idea of understanding. I think it's difficult to make clear to the non-physicist the beauty of how it fits together, of how you can build a world picture, and the beauty that the laws of physics are immutable.''
Membership
Royal Society
,
United Kingdom
1957
American Philosophical Society
,
United States
American Physical Society
,
United States
National Academy of Sciences
,
United States
Personality
People who knew Hans Bethe described him as large, raw-boned, relaxed, and with an infectious grin and broad sense of humor.
He never used computers for his calculations. He did everything with a slide rule, pencil, and paper.
His wife called him a dove, Dr. Bethe once told an interviewer, adding his own qualifier: "A tough dove." His gentle manner hid an iron will and mind that had few hesitations about identifying what he saw as error, hypocrisy, or danger.
Robert S. Norris said that Bethe was "the almost perfect expression" of the scientist-activist, driven by a sense of responsibility for his own atomic breakthroughs and those of his physicist colleagues. "He saw his role as to educate the public and the policymakers about the new dangers and help figure out ways to control them," Mr. Norris commented.
A biographer, Silvan S. Schweber of Brandeis University, author of "In the Shadow of the Bomb" (Princeton, 2000), described Bethe as a moralist who took stands in defense of universities, democracy, and society. What gave him the courage to do so, he added, was self-confidence, a strong personality, and the support of the community of friends and scientists he nurtured for nearly seven decades at Cornell.
In 1940, Time magazine called him "one of Nazi Germany's greatest gifts to the United States."
Physical Characteristics:
A 1968 profile by the journalist Lee Edison described Bethe as "a tall, spare man with a deceptively distracted look."
"His graying hair seems permanently electrified; his shoes are scuffed, and his tie seems to have been studiously arranged to miss his collar button," Mr. Edison wrote. "He listens attentively, nodding his head as if in agreement, but - as devastated colleagues and adversaries have discovered - this habit is far from a sign of agreement. His 'yes, yes, yes' is rather a signal that his mental apparatus is receiving. What he does with the input is another matter."
Quotes from others about the person
"His sense of duty toward society is so deeply ingrained that he isn't even aware of its being a sacrifice." - Victor F. Weisskopf, physicist.
Interests
stamp collecting
Politicians
John Kerry
Sport & Clubs
hiking, skiing
Connections
Hans Bethe married Rose Ewald, the daughter of German physicist Paul Ewald, in 1939. They had two children, Henry and Monica, and eventually, three grandchildren.