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The discovery of nuclear fission

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Winning the Nobel Prize
Hans Bethe Scientist
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In 1967, early in the morning at six o'clock or so, I got a phone call, and at the other end is a television producer at Stockholm telling me that I was just awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the year 1967. And that of course was a wonderful... news. I got telephone calls one after the other and we traveled... my wife and I traveled to Stockholm and had a wonderful time there. The Swedes really know how to put on a feast and how to make everybody enjoy the week, the Nobel week, I should say, which in fact is taking place just now. In fact right on this day the Nobel Prize is being handed over by the King of Sweden to this year's winners, two of whom are from Cornell University.

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.

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: Nobel Prize in Physics, 1967, Stockholm, Cornell University, King of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf

Duration: 1 minute, 27 seconds

Date story recorded: December 1996

Date story went live: 24 January 2008