“Height five feet eleven inches, 190 pounds, eyes, blue, black wavy hair, very heavy and receding at forehead, has slight accent and is very precise in speech. Subject arrived at Idlewild airport, NYC, at 12:15 PM, EDST, on flight 935 of TWA. He was carrying a number of white manila envelopes containing manuscripts in German and mathematical formula. Stops have been placed with customs to obtain baggage search when subject arrives. Material obtained … copies of mathematical formulae will be submitted [for translation].”
FBI report on Hans Bethe
“We need science education to produce scientists, but we need it equally to create literacy in the public. Man has a fundamental urge to comprehend the world about him, and science gives today the only world picture which we can consider as valid. It gives an understanding of the inside of the atom and of the whole universe, or the peculiar properties of the chemical substances and of the manner in which genes duplicate in biology. An educated layman can, of course, not contribute to science, but can enjoy and participate in many scientific discoveries which are constantly made. Such participation was quite common in the 19th century, but has unhappily declined. Literacy in science will enrich a person’s life.”
Hans Bethe — Physics Nobel Prize 1967
“I returned to civilization shortly after that and went to Cornell to teach, and my first impression was a very strange one. (…) I sat in a restaurant in New York, for example, and I looked out at the buildings and I began to think, you know, about how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was and so forth. (…) I would see people building a bridge, or they’d be making a new road, and I thought, they’re crazy, they just don’t understand, they don’t understand. Why are they making new things? It’s so useless.”
Richard Feynman — Physics Nobel Prize 1965
“After World War II, with the Manhattan Project over and the Cold War heating up, the grandfather of the atomic bomb, Professor Hans Bethe, returned to the quiet college town of Ithaca, New York to resume his research. After years of political intrigue and moral dilemma, it was a welcome return to academia. But even at remote Cornell University, an international game of spy-vs-spy would follow Bethe, complete with Soviet agents, a love triangle, and America’s most dangerous secrets.”
Robert Hovden — The Cold War comes to Cornell
October 29 2017 –Richard Feynman and Hans Bethe were theoretical physicists who received the Nobel Prize in 1965 and 1967 respectively. The Bethe – Feynman formula is a physics equation used to estimate the efficiency of an atomic weapon. This equation is widely misunderstood and surrounded by an aura of mysticism. In this post, I will thus take the time to explain how to obtain this formula from elementary ‘undergraduate’ physics. This approach is not discussed by Serber in his Los Alamos primer and, apparently, remains classified to this day. Follow us on Twitter: @INTEL_TODAY Continue reading →
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