Hans Bethe

Hans Bethe (1906-2005), German-born American physicist and Nobel laureate, noted for his contributions to theories of stellar energy production. Hans Albrecht Bethe was born in Strasbourg, Alsace-Lorraine (then part of Germany), and educated at the University of Frankfurt and the University of Munich, from which he received a doctorate degree in 1928. Bethe taught physics at various universities in Germany from 1928 to 1933 and in England from 1933 until 1935, when he began his long association with Cornell University.

From 1943 he worked at Los Alamos, New Mexico, on the atomic-bomb project (see Manhattan Project). After initial misgivings he took part in the later development of the hydrogen bomb. At the same time he continued his work for the peaceful use and international control of nuclear energy. A prime advocate of the partial test-ban agreement signed in 1963 by the United States, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the United Kingdom, he became an opponent of the Strategic Defense Initiative, proposed by the United States in the 1980s.

Bethe was awarded the 1967 Nobel Prize for Physics for his studies of the production of energy by the Sun and other stars, which he postulated occurs through thermonuclear fusion, a long series of nuclear reactions by which hydrogen is converted into helium. He was naturalized as a US citizen in 1941.