Hans Bethe

Hans Albrecht Bethe (July 2, 1906 – March 6, 2005) 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

Quotes

• We have more nuclear warheads than the Russians, and I consider this to be the most important measure of relative strength. In addition, as Dr. Kissinger stressed many years ago, at the present level of strategic armaments superiority in numbers or megatons has no meaning.
  • Bethe's testimony to the U. S. Senate's Foreign Relations Committee on 13 May 1982, as reported in the New York Review of Books: The Inferiority Complex, 10 June 1982

• You should look at all the experimental information at hand, not only the most relevant, and be prepared to make conjectures if that helps.
  • as quoted by Edwin E. Salpeter in My Sixty Years with Hans Bethe, in an edition by Gerald Edward Brown, Chang-Hwan Lee (2006). Hans Bethe and his physics. World Scientific. p. 119–120. ISBN 9812566090. 

Quotes about Bethe

• 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, was summarized in three articles in the Reviews of Modern Physics which for many years served as a textbook for nuclear physicists.
  • "Hans Bethe - Biographical". Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2014. Web. 2 Jun 2018, from Nobel Lectures, Physics 1963-1970, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1972