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Hans Bethe - Emigrating from Germany to live in Manchester with Rudi Peierls (40/158)

3,861 views · Published 27 June 2017 · 1:49 · Indexed 23 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: In 1933 emigration from Germany was very easy, you just had your passport and I could even take along the little money I had saved and receive in England the honorarium for my second Handbuch article. So that got me well started, and in a way it was very fortunate for me to emigrate because the world opened much more widely, and especially fortunately, it turned out that in Manchester there was also Rudi Peierls who had become a friend of mine in Munich and who had a wife and a newborn baby and offered me a room in his house which made me feel completely at home. So not only did I have a good place to stay, but in addition to that, Peierls and I could discuss physics constantly. We lived together, we went to the lab and we discussed physics almost all the time. Peierls was much more open to the... news in physics than I was, so he was well-informed about everything that went on in nuclear physics.

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