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American physicist Hans Albrecht Bethe won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1967. He studied thermonuclear fusion, the process by which hydrogen is converted into helium.
Hans Albrecht Bethe (1906-2005), German-born American physicist and Nobel laureate, noted for his contributions to theories of stellar energy production and to the development of nuclear weapons.
Hans Albrecht Bethe was born in Strasbourg, Alsace-Lorraine (then a part of Germany). He was educated at the University of Frankfurt and the University of Munich, from which he received a Ph.D. degree in 1928. Bethe taught physics at various universities in Germany from 1928 to 1933 and in England from 1933 until 1935, when he began his long association with Cornell University. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1941.
Beginning in 1943 Bethe worked at Los Alamos, New Mexico, on the development of the atomic bomb, an effort known as the Manhattan Project. After initial misgivings he took part in the later development of the hydrogen bomb. At the same time Bethe continued his work for the peaceful use and international control of nuclear energy. A prime advocate of the partial test-ban agreement signed by the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom in 1963, he later became an opponent of the Strategic Defense Initiative, proposed by the United States in the 1980s.
Bethe was awarded the 1967 Nobel Prize in physics for his studies of the production of energy by the Sun and other stars, which he postulated occurs through thermonuclear fusion, a long series of nuclear reactions by which hydrogen is converted into helium. He retired from Cornell in the mid-1970s but continued to be active in his field and to work for related causes into his 90s. See also Star (astronomy); Astrophysics.