Obituary: Hans Albrecht Bethe, 1906-2005

One of the unquestioned giants of physics and astrophysics, Hans Bethe, died on 6 March 2005, at the venerable age of 98, in his home town of Ithaca, New York. Seven decades of contributing to research and a Nobel Prize for his work on stellar hydrogen burning make a listing of his honors superfluous (besides being impossible in this space). Bethe was born in Strassburg, in then German Alsass Lothringen, on 2 July 1906. His father, Albrecht Julius Bethe (1872-1954), taught physiology at the University, and his mother, Anna Kuhn (1876-1966), was a musician and writer. Both his grandfathers were physicians. He spent his youth in Strassburg, Kiel, and Frankfurt, and some time in sanatoria due to tuberculosis. Hans's first scientific paper, at age 18, was with his father and a colleague, on dialysis. His education and early career in Germany brought him into contact with many top stars in the quantum revolution. Starting in Frankfurt in chemistry, Bethe soon switched to physics, taught there by Walter Gerlach and Karl Meissner, among others. In 1926, he successfully applied to join Arnold Sommerfeld's group in Munich, where he met one of his later long-term collaborators, Rudolf Peierls. Bethe considered his entry into physics to have come at an ideal time, with the new ideas of wave mechanics being developed and discussed right there; it was certainly also at an ideal place. His doctoral thesis was on the theory of electron diffraction by crystals, following the experimental work by Clinton Davisson and Lester Germer and the work on X-ray diffraction by Max von Laue and Paul Ewald. The newly minted doctor went from there briefly to Frankfurt and then to Ewald in Stuttgart, where he felt at home academically and personally. In 1939, Bethe would marry Ewald's daughter Rose. Not much later, though, Sommerfeld recalled him to Munich, where Sommerfeld created a Privatdozent position for him. There he worked out the solution for a linear chain of coupled spins by what we now call the "Bethe Ansatz." Soon after his acceptance of an assistant professorship at Tübingen in 1932, he had to flee Hitler's Germany because his mother was Jewish. Bethe went to the Bragg Institute in Manchester, England, where he worked again with Peierls. In 1934, Cornell University unexpectedly offered him a position as part of R. Clifton Gibbs's expansion of the physics department; he accepted and stayed there for the rest of his life. Right from the start, Bethe enjoyed America and its atmosphere very much. His first activity there was to write the "Bethe Bible": three articles in Reviews of Modern Physics to educate his colleagues in theoretical nuclear physics. Then he did the work that astrophysicists will still appreciate him most for, and which brought him the 1967 Nobel Prize. Having worked with George Gamow's student Charles Critchfield (at Gamow's suggestion) on the proton-proton chain for nuclear fusion in the Sun (published in 1938), Bethe was initially a bit discouraged with Arthur Eddington's estimates of the Solar core temperature; their calculations did not agree well with the observed solar luminosity. However, at the Washington conference in 1937, he heard of Strömgren's new estimates of the solar interior, which brought his and Critchfield's theory into much better agreement with the data. Fairly soon after the meeting, Bethe also worked out the process whereby more massive stars must accomplish hydrogen fusion, in what we now call the CNO cycle. Curiously, Bethe held up its publication briefly in order to compete for a prize for the best unpublished paper on energy production in stars. He did win, and used the money in part to bring his mother to the United States; eventually, the paper appeared in Physics Review in 1939, and founded a whole branch of astrophysics. The war brought Bethe to the Manhattan project, of which he became one of the intellectual leaders. He ploughed through problems theoretical and practical by attacking them head-on and not allowing himself to be side-tracked by those who would deem the problem be much more complex and difficult, moving straight forward like an intellectual battleship ("The H.A. Bethe Way," as his collaborator Gerald E. Brown would dub the style). Bethe's involvement in the Project brought to light his abilities in the managerial and political arena, which he used later to much effect to influence the wider world; he was among those who fought hard during the Cold War to contain the impact of the terrible weapons he had helped invent. As his two children, Henry and Monica, were born, the war years also made him a family man. As his father did with him, he often took them on long walks, in the hills around Ithaca or further afield; he much enjoyed walking, and mountains. Just a