Hans Bethe - Early Years

Early Years

Bethe was born in Strasbourg, Germany. Although his mother was Jewish, he was raised a Christian in the religion of his father. Despite having a religious background, he was not a religious person in later life and called himself an atheist. Bethe studied physics at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, and went on to earn his doctorate from the University of Munich with supervisor Arnold Sommerfeld, after which he did postdoctoral stints in Cambridge and at Enrico Fermi's laboratory in Rome. He was influenced by Fermi's simplicity and Sommerfeld's rigor in approaching problems, and these qualities influenced his own later research.

In 1929, Bethe made an important contribution to solid state physics and chemistry, with his formulation of the basic concepts of crystal field theory. His paper is regarded as the starting point for all serious later discussions of the topic. In 1930, he devised a formula for the energy loss of swift charged particles in matter called the Bethe formula, which is as important now as it was then.

Bethe left Germany in 1933 when the Nazis came to power and he lost his job at the University of Tübingen, moving first to England where he held a provisory position of Lecturer for the year 1933-1934 at the University of Manchester and in the fall of 1934, a fellowship at the University of Bristol. In England, Bethe worked with the theoretician Rudolf Peierls on a comprehensive theory of the deuteron.

In 1935 Bethe moved to the United States, and joined the faculty at Cornell University, a position which he occupied for the rest of his career. During 1948-1949 he was a Visiting Professor at Columbia University. At Cornell, Bethe became known as one of the leading theoretical physicists of his generation, and along with upcoming physicists such as cyclotron pioneer Milton Stanley Livingston, and later, after the war, experimentalist Robert R. Wilson and theoretician Robert Bacher, put Cornell on the world physics map. Together with Robert Bacher and Livingston, Bethe published a series of three articles which summarized most of what was known on the subject of nuclear physics until that time, an account that became informally known as "Bethe's Bible", and remained the standard work on the subject for many years. In this account, he also continued where others left off, filling in gaps from the older literature. From 1935-1938, he studied nuclear reactions and reaction cross sections, carbon-oxygen-nitrogen cycle, leading to his important contribution to stellar nucleosynthesis. This research was later useful to Bethe in more quantitatively developing Niels Bohr's theory of the compound nucleus.

Bethe became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1941. He was an honorary member of the International Academy of Science.