Our Daily Dead

NY Times
Hans A. Bethe, who discovered the violent reactions behind sunlight, helped devise the atom bomb and eventually cried out against the military excesses of the cold war, died late Sunday. He was 98, among 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. A spokesman said he died quietly at home.

Since the war years at Los Alamos, N.M., Dr. Bethe had lived in Ithaca, N.Y., an unpretentious man of uncommon gifts. His students called him Hans and admired his muddy shoes as much as the way he explained how certain kinds of stars shine. For number crunching, in lieu of calculators, he relied on a slide rule, its case battered. “For the things I do,” he remarked a few years ago, “it’s accurate enough.”

For nearly eight decades, Dr. Bethe (pronounced BAY-tah) pioneered some of the most esoteric realms of physics and astrophysics, politics and armaments, long advising the federal government and in time emerging as the science community’s liberal conscience.

During the war, he led the theoreticians who devised the atom bomb and for decades afterwards fought against many new arms proposals. His wife, Rose, often discussed moral questions with him and, by all accounts, helped him decide what was right and wrong.
Prophet of Energy

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 8th, 2005 at 12:00 am and is filed under ODD Guests. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

LA Times
Hans Bethe, the nuclear physicist whose elegant calculations explained how stars shine and laid the foundation for development of both the atomic and hydrogen bombs, has died. He was 98.

Bethe, who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1967, died Sunday at his home in Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University announced Monday.

A reluctant but crucial participant in the World War II effort to develop nuclear weapons, Bethe later became one of the country’s most passionate and persuasive proponents of disarmament. He argued that the use of such weapons would cost not only countless lives, but “liberties and human values as well.”

A brilliant, prolific and engaging theorist with an encyclopedic knowledge of nuclear physics, Bethe spent more than 60 years working with only a slide rule, a stack of blank paper and his enormous intellect, turning out page after page of mistake-free, complex calculations that fundamentally altered how scientists viewed the microscopic world of the atom.

“He was the last of the old masters,” said astrophysicist Edward Kolb of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. “He turned out classic paper after classic paper.”

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