BETHE, Hans (Albrecht) 1906–2005

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born July 2, 1906, in Strasbourg, Alsace-Lorraine, Germany; died of congestive heart failure March 6, 2005, in Ithaca, NY. Physicist, educator, and author. One of the giants of twentieth-century physics, Bethe was a Pulitzer Prize winner whose accomplishments included a description of how stars function and numerous contributions to the development of atomic weaponry at Los Alamos National Laboratyr during World War II. Growing up the son of scholars, he became interested in physics at a time when theories in quantum mechanics were coming to fruition. Completing his Ph.D. at the University of Munich in 1928, Be-the established himself in teaching. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, he taught at such institutions as the universities of Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Munich, and Tübingen. With the rise of the Nazis in Germany, Be-the, whose mother was Jewish, left his native land for England in 1933 to teach at the University of Manchester, the next year he was a fellow at the University of Bristol. In 1935, Bethe immigrated to the United States to accept an assistant professorship at Cornell University, where he became a full professor in just two years. He remained at Cornell for the rest of his academic career, retiring in 1975 after making the university a world-renowned center for the study of physics. Bethe came into the spotlight in the late 1930s, when he published a series of articles on the principles of nuclear physics. Published in Reviews of Modern Physics, these articles became known as "The Bethe Bible," and served as a guide for his colleagues in the field. Also during this time, he described the process known as the carbon cycle, a multistage process in which light is produced in some stars. It was for this accomplishment that he received the Pulitzer Prize for Physics in 1967. Because of his superlative knowledge of nuclear physics, Bethe, who had become a U.S. citizen by 1941, was courted by J. Robert Oppenheimer to join the team at Los Alamos, where scientists were hurrying to build an atomic bomb before Nazi scientists did. Persuaded to join them in 1942, Bethe headed the theoretical physics division for three years, serving also as a mentor, teacher, and even spiritual guide to his colleagues, many of whom were troubled by the implications of what they were creating. Though Bethe worked on the bomb because he felt it was necessary as a deterrent, he later became a moderating voice against nuclear weapons proliferation. In the 1950s, for example, he helped develop a means by which nuclear blasts could be detected by other nations, hoping by this development that countries limit their tests and adhere to nuclear arms treaties. From 1956 until 1964 he was on the President's Science Advisory Committee, and he opposed the proposal for developing the "Star Wars" nuclear shield in the United States during the 1980s. Because of his strong stand on such issues, Bethe was often considered to be a voice of conscience for the physics community. Among Bethe's other honors were the 1946 Presidential Medal of Merit, the 1955 Max Planck Medal, the 1959 Benjamin Franklin Medal, the 1961 Enrico Fermi Award, the 1976 National Medal of Science, the 1993 Albert Einstein Peace Prize, the 2001 Los Alamos National Laboratory Medal, and the 2001 Bruce Medal. Bethe was also the author or coauthor of numerous books, including Elementary Nuclear Theory (1956), Energy Production in Stars (1968), Reducing the Risk of War: Geneva Can Be a Giant Step toward a More Secure Twenty-first Century (1978), Basic Bethe: Seminal Articles on Nuclear Physics, 1936–1937 (1986), and Selected Works of Hans A. Bethe, with Commentary (1997).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, March 8, 2005, section 3, p. 10.

New York Times, March 8, 2005, pp. A1, C16.

Times (London, England), March 8, 2005, p. 54.

Washington Post, March 8, 2005, p. B6.