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Hiring Robert Bacher to Cornell
Hans Bethe
Scientist
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Views | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 51. First impressions of Cornell | 1 | 659 | 03:33 |
| 52. Stanley Livingston's small cyclotron | 445 | 02:46 | |
| 53. Hiring Robert Bacher to Cornell | 406 | 01:33 | |
| 54. Writing Bethe's Bible | 723 | 02:38 | |
| 55. Neutron bombardment and resonance theory: Fermi's discoveries | 953 | 04:18 | |
| 56. Explaining neutron bombardment and resonance theory | 411 | 02:13 | |
| 57. Continuing work on solid state physics | 352 | 01:10 | |
| 58. Attending meetings of the American Physical Society | 377 | 03:11 | |
| 59. Electrodynamics and becoming a full professor at Cornell | 490 | 01:55 | |
| 60. Visiting Isidor Isaac Rabi | 895 | 01:36 |
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They wanted one more experimental physicist and we had a choice between, well, Gibbs... Gibbs asked me immediately to consult with him whom we should get, and there was a list of people finally narrowed to two, and among the two we thought the most lively would be Robert Bacher, who had started as a spectroscopist, who knew some theory, who was then instructor at Columbia and who was very happy to accept, I think again an instructorship here at... at Cornell. And this became a lasting friendship. Bacher came here and he was much more knowledgeable about physics than Livingston, and less good in doing... making apparatus. So the two formed a very good team and so we all three got together and worked together a great deal.
The late German-American physicist Hans Bethe once described himself as the H-bomb's midwife. He left Nazi Germany in 1933, after which he helped develop the first atomic bomb, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1967 for his contribution to the theory of nuclear reactions, advocated tighter controls over nuclear weapons and campaigned vigorously for the peaceful use of nuclear energy.
Title: Hiring Robert Bacher to Cornell
Listeners: Sam Schweber
Silvan Sam Schweber is the Koret Professor of the History of Ideas and Professor of Physics at Brandeis University, and a Faculty Associate in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. He is the author of a history of the development of quantum electro mechanics, "QED and the men who made it", and has recently completed a biography of Hans Bethe and the history of nuclear weapons development, "In the Shadow of the Bomb: Oppenheimer, Bethe, and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientist" (Princeton University Press, 2000).
Tags: Cornell University, Robert Bacher, Stanley Livingston
Duration: 1 minute, 34 seconds
Date story recorded: December 1996
Date story went live: 24 January 2008
