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Hans Bethe - Stanley Livingston's small cyclotron (52/158)

2,401 views · Published 27 June 2017 · 2:47 · Indexed 25 October 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2017 · Science & Technology

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German-born theoretical physicist Hans Bethe (1906-2005) was one of the first scientists to join the Manhattan Project, later strongly advocating nuclear disarmament. In 1967, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. [Listener: Sam Schwebe; date recorded: 1996]

TRANSCRIPT: There was a small cyclotron which was being built by Stanley Livingston who had been the right-hand man of Ernest Lawrence in building the first cyclotron at Berkeley. And I understand that while Lawrence had the idea, the actual building was done mainly by Livingston.

[SS] And when you say 'A small cyclotron...?'

It was really a pocket cyclotron. It could give protons of about 1 million electron volts, and deuterons of 2 million electron volts, and it could give helium at higher energy but I don't think this was ever used. Deuterons were the favorite projectile to... to bombard nuclei with because they had such very strong reaction with any nucleus, and so it was deuteron reactions which were mainly investigated. So I very soon got very close to Livingston. Livingston had a card file of all papers on nuclear physics which had ever appeared, and Livingston was a very good experimenter, but didn't know much about the theory, so he was happy to have my explanation. And in this atmosphere I even did one... my only experimental paper. One of Livingston's students, I think his name was Weeks, was to follow Fermi in investigating the action of neutrons on nuclei. And so one evening, late evening, Weeks and I got together to count the reactions, I think the reaction makes alpha particles, which happen when you have argon and neutrons. My only experimental paper.

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