[Deathwatch] Hans Bethe, Nobel laureate / nuclear pioneer, 98

[Deathwatch Central <cdw@slick.org>]

Hans Bethe, 98, father of nuclear astrophysics

By William J. Broad
The New York Times
Posted March 9 2005

Nobel laureate Hans Bethe, who discovered the violent force behind
sunlight, helped devise the atom bomb and eventually cried out against
the military excesses of the Cold War, died Sundayat his home in
Ithaca, N.Y. He was 98, the last of the giants who inaugurated the
nuclear age.

His death was announced by Cornell University, where he worked and
taught for 70 years.

For almost eight decades, Dr. Bethe pioneered some of the most esoteric
realms of physics and astrophysics, politics and armaments, advising
the federal government and emerging as the science community's
conscience.

During World War II, he led the theoreticians who devised the atom bomb
and for decades afterward fought against many new arms proposals. Dr.
Bethe fled Europe for the United States in the 1930s. As a physicist,
he made discoveries in the world of tiny particles described by quantum
mechanics and the whorls of time and space envisioned by relativity
theory. He did so into his mid-90s, astonishing colleagues with his
continuing vigor and insight.

In a 1938 paper, Dr. Bethe explained how stars like the sun fuse
hydrogen into helium, releasing energy and, ultimately, light. That
work helped establish his reputation as the father of nuclear
astrophysics, and in 1967 earned him the Nobel Prize in physics.
Politically, Dr. Bethe was the liberal counterpoint to Edward Teller,
the physicist and conservative who played a dominant role in developing
the hydrogen bomb. That weapon brought to Earth a more furious kind of
solar fusion, and Dr. Bethe opposed its development as immoral.

For more than half a century, he championed many forms of arms control
and nuclear disarmament, becoming a hero of the liberals.

In 1967, Dr. Bethe was awarded the Nobel Prize for his explanation of
how the stars shine.

Hans Albrecht Bethe was born on July 2, 1906, in Strasbourg,
Alsace-Lorraine, to a family of modest means. His father, a
physiologist at the University of Strasbourg, was a Protestant, and his
mother was Jewish.

At the University of Munich, he received his doctorate, having already
made contributions to the fledgling science of quantum mechanics. He
came into conflict with the new Nazi race laws and fled Germany in
1933. He went to Cornell University, in Ithaca, where he remained the
rest of his academic life.

Dr. Bethe wrote a series of brilliant papers that culminated in the
1938 treatise "Energy Production in Stars." It set forth the first
explanation of stellar energy that explained all the known facts --
essentially, why stars like the sun burn for billions of years.

In 1943, he was named the first director of the theoretical division at
Los Alamos, the secret laboratory in New Mexico where thousands of
scientists, technicians and military personnel were gathering to learn
whether a nuclear bomb was indeed possible.

The bomb's horrors became a turning point for Dr. Bethe. After the
destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he devoted himself to trying to
stop the weapon's "own impulse," as he put it.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Dr. Bethe lent his growing prestige
to fight the government's plans to deploy anti-missile weapons. In the
1980s, he fought President Reagan's proposed shield against enemy
missiles, known popularly as "Star Wars."