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Hans Bethe - The importance of support for pure science (97/158)

2,898 views · Published 26 June 2017 · 4:00 · Indexed 20 September 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 Schweber; date recorded: 1996]

TRANSCRIPT: The Office of Naval Research was a wonderful supporter of research here at Cornell and several other places, it financed the research at our nuclear laboratory, and only much later was this taken over by the... the National Science Foundation. It took much longer for Congress and the government, as a whole, to see the importance of pure science. And unfortunately, now we are in a time when the respect for pure science has diminished again, and there is far less willingness on the part of the government to support pure science. Right after the war, it was not only the government and the Navy but it was also the great industrial laboratories; the laboratories of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, the research lab of General Electric, and then the research lab of IBM, International Business Machines, were deeply in pure research, supporting it inside the labs, supporting it also in universities. And all this great recognition of pure science by government and industrial laboratories is now decaying, especially among the industrial laboratories. Bell Labs and IBM were really marvelous in supporting pure science. And now, day by day, they are reducing their support of pure science, even in their own laboratories, and long ago they stopped supporting pure science at universities. There still is the National Science Foundation, and it does support pure science, but it also is being urged to put more emphasis on applied science, on useful things instead of recognizing that pure science means the strength of the country; and pure science, while originally totally... totally remote from applications gives rise to the most important applications. There is nuclear power, which is very much along the lines I've talked about, but there's also the laser, which originated from a paper by Einstein about the emission and absorption of light, in which he said then, that light can stimulate other light. It was a purely scientific paper, he had nothing in mind about applications, and look at it now, lasers are everywhere.

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