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Hans Bethe - Numbers prove theories (20/158)

3,664 views · Published 27 June 2017 · 1:34 · Indexed 25 October 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; date recorded: 1996]

TRANSCRIPT: It was numbers that proved Bohr's theory. It was numbers that later on led to the classification of spectra, to... Zeeman effect, determination of the angular momentum from the Zeeman effect and all that; numbers obviously were the way to prove things right. And I... there is one unpublished paper of me which... in which I tried to get the ionization potential, the binding energy of atoms up to Neon. It was a very crude approximation and I showed it to Sommerfeld and Sommerfeld said... discouraged me and said that's really not sufficiently interesting to publish, so I didn't publish it, but somebody else did, I don't remember who.

[SS] So this is already just as you come to the Sommerfeld seminar at the very beginning?

Well this I did, yes, just as I came to the seminar. I was interested in numbers, but that particular attempt I did when I returned to Sommerfeld in the fall of '29.

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