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Choosing to do theoretical physics
Hans Bethe
Scientist
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Views | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Beginning physics at Frankfurt University | 6 | 6514 | 01:48 |
| 2. My father's scientific influence on me | 1 | 2356 | 02:13 |
| 3. Choosing to do theoretical physics | 1837 | 00:59 | |
| 4. 1926: a fortunate time to study with Arnold Sommerfeld | 2135 | 01:28 | |
| 5. Albrecht Unsöld's work on stars | 1359 | 01:42 | |
| 6. Fritz Kirchner's work on the charge of the electron | 1180 | 01:52 | |
| 7. Physics journals at the time and Wilhelm Wien | 1145 | 02:48 | |
| 8. The courses I took at Munich | 1452 | 02:14 | |
| 9. My ideas in wave diffraction theory | 1102 | 03:11 | |
| 10. My thesis on electron diffraction in crystals | 1 | 1120 | 01:51 |
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I thought that I might become a mathematician, but it... mathematics was too dry for me, there was too... not enough connection with the real world. And on the other hand I also thought of becoming a chemist but that was no use because in the laboratory I was rather clumsy and put most of the chemical reactions on my lab coat, which was not very successful. So theoretical physics was the obvious thing for me to do, and there Doctor Meissner paid attention to me and encouraged me to go to Sommerfeld.
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: Choosing to do theoretical physics
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: Karl Meissner, Arnold Sommerfeld
Duration: 1 minute
Date story recorded: December 1996
Date story went live: 24 January 2008
