Quotes About Bethe

So the arguments progressed across the pleasant Berkeley summer. "We were forever inventing new tricks," Bethe says, "finding ways to calculate, and rejecting most of the tricks on the basis of the calculations. Now I could see at first-hand the tremendous intellectual power of Oppenheimer who was the unquestioned leader of our group. . . . The intellectual experience was unforgettable.

That I was named to head the [Theoretical] division," Bethe comments, "was a severe blow to Teller, who had worked on the bomb project almost from the day of its inception and considered himself, quite rightly, as having seniority over everyone then at Los Alamos, including Oppenheimer.

When Groves called, Oppenheimer chatted happily about the Bethe results. The general interrupted: "What about the weather?" "The weather is whimsical," the whimsical physicist said.2399 The Gulf air mass had stagnated over the test site. But change was coming. Jack Hubbard, the meteorologist, predicted light and variable winds the next day.

This picture of a hot early stage of the universe was first put forward by the scientist George Gamow in a famous paper written in 1948 with a student of his, Ralph Alpher. Gamow had quite a sense of humor—he persuaded the nuclear scientist Hans Bethe to add his name to the paper to make the list of authors "Alpher, Bethe, Gamow

Their colleagues soon nicknamed Feynman "The Mosquito" and Bethe "The Battleship.