Hans Bethe

At 98 years old, Hans Bethe physical status not available right now. We will update Hans Bethe's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Hans Albrecht Bethe (July 2, 1906 – March 6, 2005) was a German-American nuclear physicist who made important contributions to physics, quantum electrodynamics, and solid-state physics, and he received the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics for his research into stellar nucleosynthesis.

He was in charge of the Theoretic Division of the CIA, which produced the first atomic bombs during World War II.

In both the Trinity test and the "Fat Man" rifle dropped on Nagasaki in August 1945, he was instrumental in determining the critical mass of the arms and proposing the implosion technique used. Bethe was also instrumental in the development of the hydrogen bomb during the war, though he had hoped that it would not be made.

Bethe later worked with Albert Einstein and the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists against nuclear testing and the nuclear war.

He helped convince the Kennedy and Nixon administrations to sign the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, respectively. (SALT I). His scientific contributions never stopped and he was publishing papers well into his nineties, making him one of the few scientists to have published at least one major journal in his field during every decade of his career, which, in Bethe's case, spanned almost seven years.

Freeman Dyson, a student at the University of Toronto, has been dubbed the "supreme problem-solver of the twentieth century."

Early years

Bethe was born in Strasbourg, Germany, on July 2, 1906, Anna (née Kuhn) and Albrecht Bethe, the University of Strasbourg's sole student, were the first child of Anna (née Kuhn) and Albrecht Bethe. Despite the fact that Bethe's mother, the daughter of a professor at the University of Strasbourg, was raised Catholic, like his father, and he became an atheist later in life.

In 1912, his father accepted a job as professor and director of the Institute of Physiology at the University of Kiel, and the family moved into the director's apartment at the Institute. He was first taught privately by a qualified teacher as part of a group of eight girls and boys. When his father took over the University of Frankfurt am Main, the family moved in 1915.

Bethe attended the Goethe-Gymnasium in Frankfurt, Germany. In 1916, when he contracted tuberculosis, his education was interrupted, and he was sent to Bad Kreuznach to recuperate. He had recovered enough to attend the local realschule by 1917, and the following year, he was sent to the Odenwaldschule, a private, coeducational boarding school. He attended the Goethe-Gymnasium for his last three years of secondary schooling, from 1922 to 1924.

Bethe entered the University of Frankfurt in 1924 after completing his apprenticeship. He wanted to major in chemistry. The preparation in physics was weak, and although there were notable mathematicians in Frankfurt such as Carl Ludwig Siegel and Otto Szász, Bethe disliked their approaches, which presented mathematics in a way that was not related to the other sciences. Bethe discovered that he was a poor experimenter who sprayed sulfuric acid on his lab coat, but that the advanced physics taught by Walter Gerlach was more interesting. Gerlach left in 1925 and was replaced by Karl Meissner, who told Bethe that he should attend a university with a higher school of theoretical physics, and in particular, the University of Munich, where he could study under Arnold Sommerfeld.

Bethe began attending the University of Munich in April 1926, where Sommerfeld accepted him as a student on Meissner's recommendation. Bethe enjoyed a graduate course on differential equations in physics. Sommerfeld used to receive advance copies of scientific journals, which he used to discuss in weekly evening seminars because he was such a respected scholar. When Bethe arrived, she had just received Erwin Schrödinger's papers on wave mechanics.

Bethe investigate electron diffraction in crystals for his PhD thesis. Sommerfeld recommended Paul Ewald's 1914 paper on X-ray diffraction in crystals as a starting point. Bethe later confessed to being too enthusiastic and that his calculations became unnecessarily complicated as a result of greater certainty. "I had hoped much more from you after Sommerfeld's tales about you," Pauli told him for the first time. "I guess from Pauli," Bethe later recalled, was a compliment."

Early work

Erwin Madelung, a Frankfurt doctor, gave Bethe a job, and in September 1928, the couple, who had just divorced his mother, moved in with him. He had met Vera Congehl earlier this year and married her in 1929. Doris, born in 1933, and Klaus, born in 1934.

Bethe did not find the work in Frankfurt very stimulating, and in 1929 he accepted Ewald's invitation to the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart. Zur Theorie des Durchgangs schneller Korpuskularstrahlen durch Materie ("The Theory of Fast Corpuscular Rays Through Matter") while there. Bethe developed a simplified equation for collision problems based on Max Born's interpretation of the Schrödinger equation. The Bethe formula is still in use today. In 1930, he submitted this paper for his rehabilitation.

In 1929, Sommerfeld recommended Bethe for the Rockefeller Foundation Travelling Scholarship. This gave students $150 (roughly $2,000 in 2021 dollars) to study in another country. Bethe began doing postdoctoral work at the University of Cambridge, England, where he worked under Ralph Fowler's supervision. Bethe created a relativistic interpretation of the Bethe formula at the behest of Patrick Blackett, a cloud chamber scientist.

Bethe, a humorist, crafted On the Quantum Theory of Absolute Zero, with Guido Beck and Wolfgang Riezler, two other postdoctoral researchers, who analyzed the fine structure constant from the absolute zero temperature in Celsius units. The paper mocked a certain group of papers in theoretical physics of the day that were solely theoretical and based on spurious numerical evidence, such as Arthur Eddington's attempts to quantify the value of the fine structure constant from fundamental quantities in a previous study. They were coerced to issue an apology.

Bethe went to Enrico Fermi's laboratory in Rome in February 1931 to begin his scholarship in the second half. Fermi had awed him and regretted that he hadn't come first to Rome. Bethe introduced the Bethe ansatz, a device for finding the exact solutions for those one-body model's eigenvalues and eigenvectors. Fermi's simplicity and Sommerfeld's rigor in solving problems influenced his later research.

The Rockefeller Foundation gave Bethe's fellowship an extension, allowing him to return to Italy in 1932. Bethe began working in Munich as a privatdozent. Sommerfeld had Bethe supervise all his English-speaking postdoctoral students, including Lloyd P. Smith from Cornell University, since Bethe was fluent in English. Bethe accepted Karl Scheel's offer to write an article on the quantum mechanics of hydrogen and helium for the Handbuch der Physik. Robert Bacher and Victor Weisskopf wrote an article decades later that it was unusual in the breadth and breadth of its treatment of the subject, which needed no revision for the 1959 edition. Sommerfeld had requested Bethe to assist him with the handbuch article on electrons in metals, which was then asked. The essay was based on what is now called solid state physics. Bethe took a very different route and launched a very broad, cohesive, and complete report of it. The bulk of his time in Rome was spent on the handbuch papers, but he co-wrote a paper with Fermi that discusses charged particle interactions in a new field, quantum electrodynamics.

Bethe accepted an appointment as an assistant professor at the University of Tübingen, where Hans Geiger was the professor of experimental physics. The Law for the Restitution of the Professional Civil Service was one of the first laws to be passed by the new Nazi administration. Bethe was barred from his University work, which was a government position, due to his Jewish roots. Geiger refused to assist, but Sommerfeld rewarded Bethe back to Munich for his fellowship. Sommerfeld spent much of the summer term of 1933 searching for Jewish students and colleagues.

Bethe left Germany in 1933 and returned to England after being given a year as a lecturer at the University of Manchester, thanks to Sommerfeld's connection to William Lawrence Bragg. Rudolf Peierls and Genia Peierls' wife were able to move in with him. Peierls, a fellow German physicist who had also been refused admission to academic positions in Germany because of his ethnicity, was also barred from academic positions. Bethe had someone to speak to in German and he didn't have to eat English food, which meant he did not have to eat English food. Their professional as well as personal relationships. The fascination of Bethe in nuclear physics was sparked by Peierls. Chadwick and Maurice Goldhaber first detected deuterium photodisintegration, and Chadwick challenged Bethe and Peierls to present a theoretical explanation of the phenomenon. This was what they did on the four-hour train ride from Cambridge back to Manchester. In the years to come, Bethe will look further into the future.

Cornell's physics department was looking for a new theoretical physicist in 1933, and Lloyd Smith emphatically recommended Bethe. Bragg, who was visiting Cornell at the time, had a hand in this. Cornell offered Bethe a job as an acting assistant professor in August 1934. Bethe had already accepted a fellowship for a year to work with Nevill Mott at the University of Bristol for a year, but Cornell decided to let him start in 1935. He travelled to the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen in September 1934, where he proposed to Hilde Levi, who accepted. Bethe's mother, who despite having a Jewish background, did not want him to marry a Jewish woman. Bethe called off their engagement a few days before their wedding date in December. These two people, Niels Bohr and James Franck, were so shocked by Bethe's move that he was not allowed to the Institute again until World War II.

Personal life

Bethe's hobbies included a passion for stamp-collecting. He loved the outdoors and was an avid hiker all his life, exploring the Alps and the Rockies. On March 6, 2005, he died in his home in Ithaca, New York, of congestive heart failure. He was saved by his wife, Rose Ewald Bethe, and their two children. He was the John Wendell Anderson Professor of Physics, Emeritus, at Cornell University at the time of his death.

Source