The three long articles he produced in the late 1930s were the definitive guide for those probing the mysteries of the field. The articles, taken together, were known familiarly as "The Bethe Bible."
Like his wife, Hans Albrecht Bethe ( pronounced, BAY-tuh) was descended from an academic family. He was born July, 2, 1906, in Strasbourg, in Alsace-Lorraine, an area that had long been a zone of contention between France and Germany.
Hans Bethe at Cornell in 1996. In the background is his famous carbon cycle equation for nuclear energy generation in stars.
(Michael Okoniewski--AP)
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University professors had been in his family tree for generations. His father was a physiologist, and his mother and grandmother were professors' children.
After a secondary education in Frankfurt, at a school named for the poet Goethe, Dr. Bethe went on to the University of Frankfurt and then obtained a PhD at the University of Munich. This degree was conferred in 1928, at the time when physics was in ferment over the development of quantum mechanics, a revolutionary way of describing nature at its most elemental levels.
Seizing upon the possibilities of this new doctrine, he applied it before the 1920s had ended to some of the perplexing problems of the behavior of electrons as they bounce around among the atoms making up crystals.
He taught physics in Frankfurt, then in Stuttgart. He lectured in Munich and worked under pioneering nuclear physicist Sir Ernest Rutherford at Britain's Cambridge University. He also came in contact with Enrico Fermi and Niels Bohr, other figures from the physics pantheon.
His career appeared to reflect in part the academic inclinations of his ancestors. In the 1930s, another aspect of his ancestry helped determine the course of his life. Hitler was coming to power in Germany, and Dr. Bethe's mother was Jewish.
By 1935 he was at Cornell, where he would remain for the next 70 years and which he would help to rapidly become one of the East Coast's centers of physics.
He was often described as careful, meticulous, methodical, even austere in his work habits. Colleagues said that he prepared his masterful summary of nuclear physics by sitting in a room at a desk.
At one end of his desk was a stack of blank paper. Hour by hour, day after day, he took a sheet from the stack, covered it with words and equations, and deposited it on the other end of the desk.
Thus was written the "Bethe Bible," which appeared in a publication called the Reviews of Modern Physics.
Teller said it contained everything then known about nuclear physics -- which, he said, meant everything that Bethe knew.
About this time, Bethe and another scientist worked out in detail the process of nuclear fusion by which the sun generates its energy, producing heat and light.
He also elucidated a somewhat different mechanism by which some stars give their light. The multistage process known as the carbon cycle, required about six weeks for him to delineate. Although it has been said that many of his accomplishments merited it, this was the one that won him the Nobel Prize.
