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The Manhattan Project Heritage Preservation Association, Inc. "Preserving, Exhibiting, Interpreting and Teaching the History of the Manhattan Project" |
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| Web Master's Note: My mother, while working as an RN at the Los Alamos Engineer's Hospital, remembers Hans Bethe as a patient and how he would have his bed covered with reams of paper while working continuously on calculations. I had the occasion to speak with Dr. Bethe's secretary at Cornell University during the late summer of 2001 and she informed me that Professor Bethe still comes into his office a couple of times a week. I would like to thank Jim Roberts, editor and publisher of Cornell Magazine, for his permission to include the below article on our web site. (Note: the photos of Hans Bethe on pages 2 through 5 were obtained from other sources) |
A Tribute to...
Hans Albrecht Bethe
Page 1 of 5
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"No one any longer pays attention to - if I may call it - the spirit of physics, the idea of discovery, the idea of understanding. I think it's difficult to make clear to the non-physicist the beauty of how it fits together, of how you can build a world picture, and the beauty that the laws of physics are immutable." Hans Bethe |
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The Manhattan Project: Had America wasted more than $2 billion dollars
and the labors of well over 100,000 people? An uneasy parody of
Emerson called the "Los Alamos Blues" had been circulating
among the scientists:
From this crude lab that spawned the dud, their necks to Truman's axe uncurled, Lo, the embattled savants stood and fired the flop heard 'round the world. With the news of the bomb replica failure, the unease turned to panic. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the project director, looked physically ill. Generals and Nobel laureates were turning up for the Trinity test, which couldn't be delayed because Truman was waiting for the news of the results at the Big Three conference in Potsdam. Everyone rounded on the explosives expert, George Kistiakowsky, who later wrote, "All had much to say about that incompetent wretch who forever after would be known to the world as the cause of the tragic failure of the Manhattan Project."
This article is by Brian Hall, an Ithaca-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and Travel Holiday. It is reprinted here with the permission of Cornell Magazine. The article appeared in the August/September 1995 issue, the 50th anniversary of the dawn of the atomic age. |
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