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Hans Bethe - Gerald Brown suggests solving the problem of supernova (132/158)

951 views · Published 26 June 2017 · 2:03 · Indexed 28 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 Schweber; date recorded: 1996]

TRANSCRIPT: In the '70s I acquired the habit of going for one semester at a time to Copenhagen to the Niels Bohr Institute and to NORDITA, the Northern Collaboration in Atomic Physics. One person was there who previously had been Peierls's main collaborator, namely Gerald Brown, an American who after many years left Birmingham and went to Copenhagen to join this NORDITA. So very soon we got... became friends and when I came to Copenhagen in '78, Gerald Brown said 'Now, this time we'll solve the problem of the supernova.' He had already done some work on this and the main problem... well, there were two problems. One is: how does the collapse happen in detail; and secondly: how does the star then manage to expel all its outside? It would be entirely conceivable that the whole star would collapse into one black hole. But then in that case we wouldn't observe it.

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