Hans Bethe

His life nearly spanning the 20th century and productively extending into the 21st, Hans Bethe (1906-2005), née Hans Albrecht Bethe, earned a position in the highest rank of pioneer physicists of the 20th century. He devoted much of intellectual energy in helping develop the theory of atomic nuclei and of nuclear reactions. That work led him to discover the reactions in the sun that generate and deliver energy to its surrounding, including Earth, for which discovery, and for his discovery of the different set of nuclear reactions that generates the radiant energy of stars more massive than the sun, and for his many contributions to the theory of nuclear reactions, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1967, as sole recipient. He concluded his Nobel Lecture as follows:

If all this is true, stars have a life cycle much like animals. They get born, they grow, they go through a definite internal development, and finally they die, to give back the material of which they are made so that new stars may live.

During World War II, he headed the theoretical physics division at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he contributed to the development of the first atomic bomb.

Life and work
Hans Bethe joined the ranks of humanity in Strasbourg, in the then German (now French) Alsace-Lorraine region. He was born on July 2, 1906, and died in Ithaca, New York State, on March 6, 2005, leaving humanity with a invaluable legacy of knowledge about the nature of the universe and of humanity itself. He spent his boyhood growing up in an educated family, his father, Albrecht, was a professor of physiology, his mother, Anna, was Jewish, and a daughter of a university professor. Hans received private tutorship and showed precocity in mathematics. He attended Goethe Gymnasium in Frankfurt, when his family moved there in 1915, his father having received an invitation to establish a department of physiology at the university there. At age 18 years (1924), he began undergraduate studies at the University of Frankfurt, where he remained for two years.