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Hans Bethe - Short range order vs long range order in the metal alloy (46/158)

3,854 views · Published 27 June 2017 · 2:03 · Indexed 20 September 2026

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

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To hear more of Hans Bethe’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvgLyzTEmJk&list=PLVV0r6CmEsFyUDSroBQVEcbnNud7I9xom

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]

TRANSCRIPT: And I found also that above the transition point, the Curie point, order was still persisting in a local way. There was no order... no long range order, that is, an atom of gold here doesn't know about an atom of aluminum there, but the neighbors know about it and so the neighbors still have good order. And so I introduced the concept of short range order versus long range order. Short range order doesn't change very much, well it changes some at the Curie point, and I could calculate that the transition would be a second order transition, that is the... there would not be a latent heat, but the specific heat would have a peak and then go down to a more normal level, but there would still be some specific heat which was connected with the destruction of local order when the temperature rises higher. So that fit the experiments very nicely and I think made Bragg very happy. And Peierls afterwards made my theory a lot better. Instead of counting configurations of atoms, he went back to good statistical mechanics and made the theory really respectable.

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