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Resonance for neutral pi mesons

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Members of the Cornell Laboratory of Nuclear Studies
Hans Bethe Scientist
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I should mention one collaborator in the endeavor, namely Sam Schweber, and they did produce a theory but it didn't really solve the problem. We also had a high energy machine which was started by Bacher, but Bacher was then called away to become the Scientific Member of the first Atomic Energy Commission. And fortunately we were able to induce Robert Wilson to take his place, so the nuclear laboratory was in... remained in good hands and under Wilson the synchrotron that was started was actually built and it was put into operation. And Wilson brought with him some of his people from his group at Los Alamos, and so we had a very competent group of experimental physicists working on the synchrotron.

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: Atomic Energy Commission, Cornell Electron-positron Storage Ring, CESR, Wilson Synchrotron Laboratory, Cornell University, Sam Schweber, Robert Bacher, Robert R Wilson

Duration: 1 minute, 28 seconds

Date story recorded: December 1996

Date story went live: 24 January 2008