Book ID: CBB001201092

Nuclear Forces: The Making of the Physicist Hans Bethe (2012)

unapi

Schweber, Silvan Sam (Author)


Harvard University Press


Publication Date: 2012
Physical Details: viii + 579 pp.; ill.
Language: English

On the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima, Nobel-winning physicist Hans Bethe called on his fellow scientists to stop working on weapons of mass destruction. What drove Bethe, the head of Theoretical Physics at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, to renounce the weaponry he had once worked so tirelessly to create? That is one of the questions answered by Nuclear Forces, a riveting biography of Bethe's early life and development as both a scientist and a man of principle. As Silvan Schweber follows Bethe from his childhood in Germany, to laboratories in Italy and England, and on to Cornell University, he shows how these differing environments were reflected in the kind of physics Bethe produced. Many of the young quantum physicists in the 1930s, including Bethe, had Jewish roots, and Schweber considers how Liberal Judaism in Germany helps explain their remarkable contributions. A portrait emerges of a man whose strategy for staying on top of a deeply hierarchical field was to tackle only those problems he knew he could solve. Bethe's emotional maturation was shaped by his father and by two women of Jewish background: his overly possessive mother and his wife, who would later serve as an ethical touchstone during the turbulent years he spent designing nuclear bombs. Situating Bethe in the context of the various communities where he worked, Schweber provides a full picture of prewar developments in physics that changed the modern world, and of a scientist shaped by the unprecedented moral dilemmas those developments in turn created. What drove Nobel-winning physicist Hans Bethe, head of Theoretical Physics at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, to later renounce the weaponry he had worked so tirelessly to create? That is one of the questions answered by Nuclear Forces, a riveting biography of Bethe's early life and development as both a scientist and a man of principle.

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Reviewed By

Essay Review Walker, Mark (2015) Émigré Biographies [Review Essay Number 1552111]. Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (pp. 206-216). unapi

Review Hubisz, John L. (2014) Review of "Nuclear Forces: The Making of the Physicist Hans Bethe". Physics Teacher. unapi

Review Navarro, Jaume (2014) Review of "Nuclear Forces: The Making of the Physicist Hans Bethe". British Journal for the History of Science (pp. 579-580). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001201092/

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Authors & Contributors
Oppenheimer, Frank
Cassidy, David C.
Hoerlin, Bettina
Alberto Bentoglio
Salio, Giovanni
Alessandro Costazza
Concepts
Atomic, nuclear, and particle physics
Nuclear weapons; atomic weapons
Manhattan Project
Science and politics
Biographies
Physics
Time Periods
20th century
20th century, early
20th century, late
Places
United States
Germany
Italy
England
Berkeley (California, U.S.)
Milan (Italy)
Institutions
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore
University of California, Berkeley
Carnegie Institute of Technology
Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (U.S.)
U.S. Atomic Energy Commission
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