ithaca, n.y. | Hans Bethe, who played a pivotal role in designing the first atomic bomb and won a Nobel Prize for figuring out how the sun and other stars generate energy, has died at the age of 98.
Bethe, one of the last of the giants of 20th-century physics, died this week at his home, Cornell University announced this week.
Born in Strasbourg in 1906, Bethe fled Nazi Germany in 1933 after losing a university post because his mother was Jewish.
Bethe, who joined the Cornell faculty in 1935, also made major discoveries about how atoms are built up from smaller particles, what makes dying stars blow up as supernovas, and how heavier elements are produced from the ashes of supernovas.
He averaged a scientific breakthrough every decade or so, beginning in the golden age of physics between the world wars, and became one of the 20th century’s most accomplished and admired scientists.
In 1938, leading nuclear physicists were invited to crack a pivotal enigma that had long stumped the best scientific minds: the sun’s energy source, and Bethe came up with his Nobel Prize-winning “carbon cycle” formula six weeks later. He showed that virtually all the energy produced by the most brilliant stars stems from a fusion reaction in which hydrogen serves as the fuel and carbon as the catalyst.
During World War II, he was a key figure in the building of the first atomic bomb as head of the Manhattan Project’s theoretical physics division at Los Alamos, N.M. His indefatigable aura earned him the nickname of “The Battleship” at Los Alamos, the laboratory where the atomic bomb was developed.
Even though the atomic bomb designers knew its calamitous potential, the weapon’s reality “was worse than we expected,” Bethe reflected in an interview in November 1996. “After Hiroshima, many of us said: ‘Let’s see that it doesn’t happen again.'”
Bethe played key roles in the 1963 and 1972 bans on atmospheric nuclear tests and anti-ballistic missiles.
He emerged in an era bursting with discoveries about fundamental building blocks of matter. In the infancy of modern atomic theory, he spelled out what was known and unknown in nuclear physics in a classic series of papers dubbed Bethe’s Bible.