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Paul Peter Ewald

RELATED STORIES

Born approximation
Hans Bethe Scientist
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I used Born approximation like Moliére's Gentilhomme used prose; I didn't know about Born approximation.

[Q] No I... I'm merely coming back that when Pauli criticizes you, it is really when you try to be much more ambitious than that.

Exactly. Yes, well I went to a second approximation which got very clumsy and involved, but it has been used in recent years by crystallographers to go one step farther.

The late German-American physicist Hans Bethe once described himself as the H-bomb's midwife. He left Nazi Germany in 1933, after which he helped develop the first atomic bomb, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1967 for his contribution to the theory of nuclear reactions, advocated tighter controls over nuclear weapons and campaigned vigorously for the peaceful use of nuclear energy.

Listeners: Sam Schweber

Silvan Sam Schweber is the Koret Professor of the History of Ideas and Professor of Physics at Brandeis University, and a Faculty Associate in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. He is the author of a history of the development of quantum electro mechanics, "QED and the men who made it", and has recently completed a biography of Hans Bethe and the history of nuclear weapons development, "In the Shadow of the Bomb: Oppenheimer, Bethe, and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientist" (Princeton University Press, 2000).

Tags: Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, Max Born, Molière

Duration: 50 seconds

Date story recorded: December 1996

Date story went live: 24 January 2008