Hans Bethe Quotes

Hans Albrecht Bethe was a German-American nuclear physicist who made important contributions to astrophysics, quantum electrodynamics and solid-state physics, and 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. During World War II, he was head of the Theoretical Division at the secret Los Alamos laboratory which developed the first atomic bombs. There he played a key role in calculating the critical mass of the weapons and developing the theory behind the implosion method used in both the Trinity test and the "Fat Man" weapon dropped on Nagasaki in August 1945.

After the war, Bethe also played an important role in the development of the hydrogen bomb, though he had originally joined the project with the hope of proving it could not be made. Bethe later campaigned with Albert Einstein and the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists against nuclear testing and the nuclear arms race. He helped persuade the Kennedy and Nixon administrations to sign, respectively, the 1963 Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty .

His scientific research never ceased and he was publishing papers well into his nineties, making him one of the few scientists to have published at least one major paper in his field during every decade of his career – which, in Bethe's case, spanned nearly seventy years. Freeman Dyson, once one of his students, called him the "supreme problem-solver of the 20th century". Wikipedia  

✵ 2. July 1906 – 6. March 2005
Hans Bethe photo
Hans Bethe: 2   quotes 3   likes

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 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1982/06/10/the-inferiority-complex/

“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, Hans Bethe and his physics, World Scientific, 2006, 9812566090, 119–120]

Similar authors

Werner Heisenberg photo
Werner Heisenberg 42
German theoretical physicist
Otto Stern photo
Otto Stern 2
German physicist
Edward M. Purcell photo
Edward M. Purcell 3
American physicist
Ernst Ruska photo
Ernst Ruska 2
German physicist
Max Planck photo
Max Planck 30
German theoretical physicist
Niels Bohr photo
Niels Bohr 37
Danish physicist
Murray Gell-Mann photo
Murray Gell-Mann 10
American physicist
Albert Einstein photo
Albert Einstein 702
German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativi…
Enrico Fermi photo
Enrico Fermi 9
Italian physicist
Arthur Compton photo
Arthur Compton 2
American physicist