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Hans Bethe - Getting to know George Placzek and Edward Teller (36/158)

3,912 views · Published 27 June 2017 · 2:43 · Indexed 18 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 the spring of '32 I went again to Rome, still on the Rockefeller Fellowship. This time I was almost completely occupied by writing the Handbuch articles, but I had a very good time. There were two other visitors, George Placzek and Edward Teller. George Placzek in... sat to my left in the same room in which I was writing. He had a very... he also was supposed to write a Handbuch article about the Raman Effect, but he found it far more difficult to deal with that. And so mostly he turned the pages, but there was not much on it. But I developed a very nice friendship with Placzek who was one of the nicest and most thoroughgoing people I have known. He was indeed studying the Raman Effect of molecules and later on he was... he studied the behavior of neutrons diffusing through matter. Every time he was extremely thorough and went to the sources. Usually he loved the library at the institute in Rome because he could follow the subject of Light Scattering back to 1800's, and he then used that in his article. We went out to dinner together every day and remained friends ever since. There was also Edward Teller who mostly worked outside the institute, but also worked about molecules and I got to know him also well and we also became friends.

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