When Hitler came to power in 1933, Bethe, whose mother was Jewish, also had to leave his country.
German-born American physicist. Explaining the chain of interaction, which is the energy source of the stars, he realized the first application of nuclear physics to the field of astrophysics. He was born on July 2, 1906, in Strassburg, in the Elsass-Lothringen region of Germany (today Strasbourg in Alsace-Lorraine in France). He is the son of a physiology professor and the only child in the family. After graduating from Goethe High School in Frankfurt-Main, he started his education at the university in the same city. He received his doctorate from the University of Munich in 1928, working as an assistant first at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at Frankfurt/Main University and then at the Stuttgart Higher Technical School. Bethe, who went to England and Italy between 1930-1931, worked with Rutherford at Cambridge University and Fermi at the University of Rome for a while, then returned to Germany and started to work as an associate professor at the University of Tübingen. This task, however, did not last long; In 1933, Hitler came to power, and Bethe, whose mother was Jewish, had to leave his country.
Hans Albrecht Bethe (July 2, 1906 – March 6, 2005) was a German-American theoretical physicist who made major contributions to nuclear physics, astrophysics, quantum electrodynamics, and solid-state physics, and who won the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. For most of his career, Bethe was a professor at Cornell University.
He first went to England and worked at the universities of Manchester and Bristol. He immigrated to the United States in 1935 and was accepted to an adjunct professorship at Cornell University in Ithaca; two years later, he became a professor in a special chair established in the name of Wendell Anderson. Bethe, who married the daughter of his professor Ewald, with whom he worked in Munich and Stuttgart in 1939, and became a citizen of the USA in 1941, was appointed as the head of the Department of Theoretical Physics at Los Alamos Scientific Research Laboratory between 1943 and 1946. He participated in the Manhattan Project, which would result in the construction of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But despite playing such an important role in the design of the atomic bomb, he was conscious that a nuclear war would emit enough radiation to wipe out all life from the face of the earth. For this reason, together with some scientists who took part in this project, he published the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist, which is known for its attitude towards nuclear armament. He firmly supported nuclear disarmament, assuming the chairmanship of the Presidential Disarmament Study Group in 1958 and taking part in the US delegation to the First International Conference on the Nuclear Test Ban convened in Geneva that same year.
Returning to his chair at Cornell University after the war and serving on the Presidential Science Advisory Committee between 1956 and 1939, Bethe is also a member of many scientific societies such as the American Physical Society, which he chaired in 1954, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Royal Society in London. Apart from national medals and awards, he was awarded the Max Planck Medal in 1955, the Fermi Prize in 1961, and the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1967, for his valuable contributions to the fields of nuclear physics, solid-state physics, particle-matter interaction, electrodynamics, hydrodynamics, and astrophysics. took the nude.
Bethe's most productive years coincided with the late 1920s, a period when the foundations of quantum mechanics were laid. In those years when theoretical physics was in its golden age, successful theories were developed that shed light on the understanding of many physical phenomena, and every thought put forward led to new research on both the theoretical and experimental levels.
One of the greatest of these researchers and theorists is Bethe. Moreover, Bethe, like most researchers, did not limit his studies to a certain field, and dealt with many subjects, closely following the developments and undertook the task of compiling the scientific activity of his age. The best proof of this is the three comprehensive review articles he wrote on three different branches of physics in as little as five years.
Bethe started his doctoral thesis and made his first studies in solid state physics such as electron diffraction and density in crystals, electron wave functions, and behavior of electrons in metals. In these studies, which included one of the first applications of group theory to quantum mechanics, he calculated electron wave functions using crystal symmetries and contributed greatly to the energy loss problem of fast particles in matter. Information on the energy loss of fast particles is of great importance in radiation protection as well as in the design of nuclear physics experiments and reactors.