Nuclear Forces: The Making of the Physicist Hans Bethe

by Silvan S. Schweber

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 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.

Genres: Biography, Physics, History, Science

608 pages, Hardcover

First published June 13, 2012

Reviews

[Bobat Chearsdotorg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent story of the life of a giant of 20th C physics, who won the Nobel Prize for explaining the nuclear processes that power the Sun and other stars. The author is himself a well known physicist, and knew Hans Bethe well both professionally and personally.

[Charles Kerns · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author starts by presenting an apology for writing biography, considered by him and his fellow academics as the lowest form of history. He then tries to make up for his choice by writing the dryest, dullest bio ever written. I gave it two stars because the subject, Bethe, was not dull: he calculated how to build the A-bomb, struggled with Teller, came to Oppenheimer's defence in the witchhunt, and opposed nuclear weapons, later in life. The recounting of Bethe's life, however, reads like a snooze-thru lecture. This story should be told, but maybe by someone else.

the book does get better about page 100 when it starts including equations and physics into the story--especially if you are a geekreader (like many of us). So hold on as you read part one or just jump past Hans' schooling, his german upbringing, etc. to the physics courses that he took.