His students at Cornell recalled his patience, warmth and booming laugh. Not only that, but 70 years ago, nuclear scientists knew the delights of road trips.
In 1937, an important physics conference was being held at Stanford University. Teller and his wife went with Bethe and his spouse. According to Teller, "we all piled into Hans's car and drove across the nation."
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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Dr. Bethe became an American citizen in 1941, and the next year was among the handful of top scientists invited by Oppenheimer to Berkeley, Calif., for discussions on designing an atomic bomb.
"The fission bomb had to be done," Dr. Bethe later told a biographer, "because the Germans were presumably doing it."
This led to the creation of Los Alamos, where Dr. Bethe, as head of the theoretical division, led some of the world's best physicists in the complex calculations that were essential to building a workable bomb. Later, scientists would gather to watch him compete with Feynman in computation contests.
After the war, he returned to the academic world, appearing to hold the position that the bomb already built should be sufficient to maintain peace. He rejected Teller's early pleas to return to Los Alamos to work on the more powerful thermonuclear weapon.
Eventually, however, he did work on it, after being persuaded of its necessity. Once described as a dove, he told an interviewer, as quoted in a newspaper, that a better description would be "a tough dove."
He sought to avoid taking what he perceived as extremist positions in the arms control debates of the 1950s, and, ever the pragmatist, worked to develop blast detection systems that could be used to enforce bans on testing. He saw possible value in the use of fission to generate electricity.
He served on the President's Science Advisory Committee from 1956 to 1964 and received the government's Fermi Award.
Serene and energetic, he kept active as he grew older. At the age of 93, he gave three lectures to neighbors at an Ithaca retirement community. The topic was quantum theory.
In addition to his wife, survivors include two children.
Staff writer Louie Estrada contributed to this report.
