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Hans Bethe - The use of my paper on shockwaves with Edward Teller (84/158)

3,113 views · Published 27 June 2017 · 2:44 · Indexed 27 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 recorded1996]

TRANSCRIPT: So we wrote a paper together and since that was obviously of interest for aviation and probably for the coming war it was never published. It was printed and distributed by the Aberdeen Proving Ground arm of the US Army and I guess we could get copies of it. It was not classified, that is it was not officially secret, but it could not be published in a journal. It has not been published to the present day in any journal, but it has been published in independent pamphlets and it was the starting point for many experimental investigations after the war. In fact shock waves were used as a means to study the rate of chemical reactions in air, and it could also be used for other gases. In particular Arthur Kantrowitz made a life work out of this and studied the rate of molecule... of chemical reactions and similar things in various gases by using our paper.

[SS] You actually also write at this very same time and connected with the same project a paper on shock waves in systems with specified equations of state, I mean more general investigation of...

I did that, encouraged, especially by John von Neumann who was deep in war work from the very beginning and it's not a terribly important paper. But I found one curious point, namely in a shock wave normally the matter is compressed, but if you take water between 0oC and 4oC, then it expands under a shock wave.

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