To hear more of Hans Bethe’s stories, go to the playlist: [ Ссылка ]

German-born theoretical physicist Hans Bethe (1906-2005) was one of the first scientists to join the Manhattan Project, later strongly advocating nuclear disarmament. In 1967, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. [Listener: Sam Schweber]

TRANSCRIPT: Of course there was a lot of... of controversy about the interpretation. There was Schrödinger who wanted to see his waves as something real, just like electric waves. And there was on the other side Niels Bohr, a much bigger authority, who strenuously objected to that; pointing out that after all electrons had been shown to be particles and one had the direct experiments seeing electrons in the tube. And that problem was then enlightened by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle which showed that you had to consider electrons both as waves and as particles, but when you use the particle picture then the position and velocity of the electron could not simultaneously be measured accurately. That fitted right into Niels Bohr's ideas and everybody including Sommerfeld accepted this picture. It took a lot of persuasion for Schrödinger to accept it.

[SS] And he never did.

He finally did.

свернуть