Honouring Hans Bethe

摘要

Physicists and friends from all over the USA assembled at Cornell University on 24 October to honour Hans Bethe on his retirement. Bethe has made important contributions to the fields of atomic, solid state and nuclear physics, and to the development of the theory of radiation. In 1967 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for calculations explaining how a star uses nuclear fuel as its power source, published in 1938. It is now known that most of the starlight visible in the night sky is produced by the ‘Bethe cycle’.