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Nuclear physics

Nuclear physics

Hans Bethe’s early life

18 Oct 2012

Nuclear Forces: the Making of the Physicist Hans Bethe
Silvan Schweber
2012 Harvard University Press £25.95/$35.00hb 518pp

Personal profile

In 1937, two years after he moved to the US to escape Nazi persecution, the physicist Hans Bethe sent a letter to his mother in Germany. In it, he wrote, “I think I am about the leading theoretician in America. [Eugene] Wigner is certainly better and [Robert] Oppenheimer and [Edward] Teller probably just as good. But I do more and talk more and that counts too.”

Four decades after Bethe sent that letter, I decided to try to write a profile of him for the New Yorker. I had been writing about science for the magazine for nearly 20 years, and I thought that Bethe would make an excellent subject. By then he was perhaps no longer the “leading theoretician in America”, but his body of work was extraordinary, and it spread over many branches of physics. Bethe had played a leading role in building both the atomic bomb during the Second World War and the hydrogen bomb after it. However, he had subsequently turned his efforts towards stopping the proliferation of these weapons, and attempting to stop the construction of an anti-missile system that he was sure would not work. His work on the sources of stellar energy, which won him the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1967, was almost a sideline. And by the late 1970s he was devoting much time to trying to solve what he saw as an impending energy crisis.

All of these seemed like very good reasons for doing a profile, but there were two problems. One was that I had never met Bethe. The other was that the New Yorker‘s editor at the time, William Shawn, had an absolute loathing for nuclear energy, which Bethe insisted had to be part of the mix. I decided that the best course was to try to write a more personal profile in which the energy question could play a part. I wrote to Bethe and he agreed, but he warned that his personal life was not “terribly interesting”.

On that rather shaky basis, I conducted a series of interviews with him on and off for two years, then wrote a long article. It was scheduled for publication in the beginning of 1979, but then came the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, which seemed to confirm everything that Shawn believed about nuclear energy. He cancelled my article after it was already in galley stage. In the end, the article was published, but only after I threw a tantrum – the first and last I ever threw while I was at the New Yorker.

I was reminded of all of this as I read a remarkable biographical study of the first 40 years of Bethe’s life. Nuclear Forces: the Making of the Physicist Hans Bethe is written by the physicist and historian of science Silvan Schweber, who actually worked with Bethe at Cornell and got to know him and his family well. Bethe died on 6 March 2005 at the age of 98, and his passing has allowed Schweber to tell us things that I would not have had the courage to tell in 1979, even if I had known them – which in many cases I did not.

Bethe was born on 2 July 1906 in Strasbourg in Alsace-Lorraine, then part of Germany. His father was a distinguished physiologist who came from a Protestant family. His mother was Jewish and her father, a physician, was one of the few Jews to hold a university position. Bethe, however, never thought of himself as a Jew until the Nazi racial laws designated him as one in 1933, forcing him out of his job at the University of Tübingen and out of the country.

When Schweber asked Bethe what he might have done if he had not been Jewish, Bethe replied that he might have done war research in Germany to escape military service. He added that unlike Werner Heisenberg, he would not have wished for a German victory. I wish that Schweber had gone on to ask if Bethe would have joined Heisenberg in his attempt to make a nuclear weapon.

Bethe told me that his parents had gotten divorced and that his father, who remained in Germany, had remarried. But that was about all. Schweber, however, has gone deeply into Bethe’s relationship with his mother, which was – and this is the only way I can think to describe it – deeply neurotic. Well into his 30s, Bethe was writing letters to his mother about the details of his romantic life and seeking her approval. Once, Bethe got engaged to a woman, but broke off the engagement shortly before the wedding because of his mother’s influence. It is remarkable that he was able to marry the woman he finally did marry, Rose Ewald, and perhaps even more remarkable that they did not get divorced when Bethe’s mother came over from Germany to move in with them. If she had not been persuaded to move out, the marriage might have been wrecked.

I did not know this when I wrote my profile, and in a way, I am glad – not because I would have been tempted to put any of it in, but because I would have felt that it was something I did not need to know. Schweber, however, is writing a real biography and details like this must be part of it.

Schweber also describes the close friendship that Bethe had with Edward Teller and with Teller’s wife, Mici. They had much in common. Teller and Bethe were intellectual equals, and all three were Jewish refugees finding their way in a new country. They did all sorts of things together, and when Bethe married Rose, the four of them continued. The friendship started to unravel at Los Alamos when the head of the Manhattan Project, Robert Oppenheimer, made Bethe instead of Teller head of the theoretical division. Teller resented this for the rest of his life and more or less refused to do work for the division. The friendship finally ended after Bethe tried unsuccessfully to persuade Teller not to testify against Oppenheimer during the latter’s security trial. Teller’s testimony was devastating, and he became something of a pariah in the physics community.

There is little of this in Schweber’s book, though, as it stops just before the war. Hence there is almost nothing about Los Alamos or the postwar physics in which Bethe played a very important role. What Schweber has written, however, is done with such care and in such detail that one hopes there will be a sequel of some kind.

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