Freeman Dyson - Hans Bethe (65/157)

To listen to more of Freeman Dyson’s stories, go to the playlist: • Freeman Dyson (Scientist)
Freeman Dyson (1923-2020), who was born in England, moved to Cornell University after graduating from Cambridge University with a BA in Mathematics. He subsequently became a professor and worked on nuclear reactors, solid state physics, ferromagnetism, astrophysics and biology. He published several books and, among other honours, was awarded the Heineman Prize and the Royal Society's Hughes Medal. [Listener: Sam Schweber; date recorded: 1998]
TRANSCRIPT: I was immediately impressed with how friendly he was and how much he cared about students, just that we were just a friendly bunch in a way that I'd never experienced in England. Well, the very first afternoon when I walked into this freezing cold building and I met Bethe, the thing which I noticed first was extraordinary muddy boots he was wearing. It was one of these hot steamy days where the ground was very muddy and no professor in England would be seen in such muddy boots. And the other thing was that all the students called him Hans, and that was something completely new to me, I mean, even, I can't imagine calling even my best friend, Besicovitch, I never called him Abram and it just wouldn't have occurred to us to call a professor by his first name.
[SS] Nor Kemmer?
No, Kemmer was always Kemmer.
[SS] Dr Kemmer?
No, not Dr Kemmer. No - he was Kemmer, I think, but that's the way it was. I mean - family names. And, anyway, so Hans was very different and his whole style was different. He had this intense love of doing physics collectively. I mean that it wasn't really physics if you did by yourself, it was something you did with a group of people. And so I just loved it from the beginning and became very much a part of it right away. And then, of course, his way of work was actually quite unique, I mean if you compare Bethe with anybody else I knew. First of all, he had total command of the facts, that he absolutely just - you never needed to look up a number in a table because he knew them all. He knew all the energy levels of hydrogen and he knew the atomic weights of the different elements and the density of lead and gold and uranium, all these just physical quantities, he knew them all. In addition of course, he had an extraordinary ability to sit down and calculate and just simply go at it. He would have a problem, he would simply sit down and do it, and that's rather unique I think. I mean he went on calculating all day long whenever he wasn't interrupted, and he almost always was interrupted, but that didn't matter because he would get to page 352 in his stack of pages and then he would be interrupted by a student, and then as soon as the student went out of the door he'd go back to page 353, and he would just continue without a break. So he used his time with amazing efficiency. So he was able to do really hard calculations without spending too much time, just by working so efficiently. And he was, of course, also just extraordinarily reliable: if he said something, you could believe it. He was very careful about everything he said. So just a thoroughly solid person. Very different from Feynman, because Feynman was far more imaginative. I mean, one thing Bethe did not have was imagination; he never really invented anything, he just used the theories that were there to explain the facts, and he knew the facts and he knew the theories, so he just put them together; whereas Feynman was always inventing things and he didn't believe the theories that were taught in the textbooks, he had to make them up for himself, so he had a much harder time; but still, of course, in the end you need imagination too; I mean, both kinds of physicists are needed. But for me Hans was just ideal because what I needed was just guidance in doing some real calculations and as a guide Feynman would have been useless to me. In fact, he was not good with graduate students at all. He always said he didn't like graduate students and if he had a problem that would be of interest to a student he would do it himself, and that he just wasn't able to supply the kinds of problems that students needed because everything that he worked on was generally so imaginative and beyond the reach of students. So for me, it was far better that I was working with Bethe, but at the same time I could learn a hell of a lot from Feynman.

[@analogdesigner-Jay]

I like Dyson because he's so honest!

[@keithwald5349]

Yeah, it seems like most of those physicists from the "golden age" were not only honest, but didn't take things personally either. Like HenryDavidT (Walden anyone?) pointed out, Dyson was grateful to Fermi after he demolished Dyson's entire research program, so they didn't waste years running down the wrong path. Or Feynman telling Bethe and also Bohr "No, you're wrong. You're idea is no good, and here's why..." Being a genius didn't mean one was necessarily correct, and being wrong didn't mean one was a fool. The truth was what mattered above all else.

[@BlueSoulTiger]

3:29 "[Bethe was] a thoroughly solid person". A very high compliment indeed.

[@kirkmattoon2594]

About Bethe liking to work with people: He was one of the few theoretical physicists who went out of his way to help experimenters. His German Handbuch articles and his later 'Bethe's Bible' articles were designed to sum up all knowledge in the field with reference to experimental evidence and techniques. His amazing memory made him able, for a while, to hold the whole field in his mind.

[@emmanuelpaschos7192]

I was assistant to Bethe and he was wonderful teacher. My job was to correct the exercises. It is unfortunate he was not teaching field theory.

[@christophjansen646]

I had the pleasure to get to know Profs. Wilhelm Klemm and Hans Georg von Schnering and they conveyed to me a glimpse of the academical world Freeman Dyson describes here, especially with respect to the human aspect and to inspiration. A former assistant of both was my first instructor in experimental chemistry, Claus Brendel, whom I remember most fondly. I took from these encounters a deep love of the experiment for its own sake - meaning that working out a way to discover something new is what science is about. The road is the goal, all else is just textbooks, no matter how beautiful finished theories may seem as you learn. As a person, you grow on the search, not on simple knowledge. Your desire to go forward is what makes you really feel alive, and each find is delightful. That has set a spark into my heart that still burns after all these years, probably till my end.

[@NothingMaster]

Hans was truly an exceptional scientist and a most generous human being.

[@craigwall9536]

He also had a very happy marriage.

[@alexplotkin3368]

Bethe had a great smile and he just seemed so affable in the pictures.

[@arunbalan5054]

His delivery of speech is soothing and wants to listen more and more. Great person

[@steinrich56]

Fascinating glimpse into a world gone by....thank you so much for the upload. These people really were the movers and shakers who shaped our world today.

[@smoothcriminal28]

Hans Bethe is one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century without a doubt.

[@SalmanBJJ]

Ozzy 👍🏻👍

[@Nostradamus_Order33]

So, where is Fermi on your list?

[@anonymous-sr5ks]

He was brilliant with his arithmetic.

[@robbie_]

Feynman tells a story about Bethe's calculating ability from their time together in his very entertaining talk, "Los Alamos from Below" (it's on KZbin!).

[@rogeralsop3479]

Marvellous man.

[@PerryWidhalm]

What a great human being .... he will be missed.

[@emmanuelpaschos7192]

Years later at SLAC I met Feynman and was the first physicists to discuss parton ideas for deep inelastic scattering. It was at the hotel Flamingo in El Camino Real. I realized it was original and applied it to the experiments at SLAC.

[@lyreco7910]

Amazing!

[@benu7930]

❤❤ even for someone like me who is on the literary side of life listening to Dyson is so much pleasureable and profiting.

[@robertschlesinger1342]

Interesting and worthwhile video.

[@softwarephil1709]

My impression of Feynman is that he was very smart, very fast thinking, but rather arrogant and unfriendly unless you were one of the few people he respected.

[@CocoaBeachLiving]

Much respect Freeman Dyson 👌🌴

[@TheGsoffer]

Wow - Thanks!

[@rossschmidt8073]

100 Percent accurate on all accords.. Especially on why Feynman was beyond a genius.. Coming straight from a big time math freak interview…

[@vozho1]

I started reading the video description, and it says "Freeman Dyson (1923-2020)...". This stunned me. He died 9 days ago!

[@ronwilliams4184]

Yes, more important things got in the way of even a footnote. I didn't even read the video description - I just had some curiosity about how he was getting on... I somehow thought he was immortal, and in a sense, he is, if not in the most important way.

[@PauloConstantino167]

what I wanna know is how difficult was it to understand swingher ?

[@WJV9]

Dyson talks about that in this series, in the 70's I think.

[@znhait]

I guess it explains why Bethe was in charge of the theoretical division since he was a human calculator.

[@johnmiller5259]

☺️🙏

[@kimjeffry6694]

Who was the person dyson was talking about when he was saying i can't imagine calling my best friend...??

[@ccgamedes33]

Besicovitch.

[@debabratabhattacharyya2266]

He praised Bethe all along to say he was less talented than Feynman

[@znhait]

That's not what he said at all. He only said that Feyman was more imaginative but that Bethe was more structured in his thinking. Nowhere in that clip did I get the idea that Feyman was a more talented physicist.

[@DumbledoreMcCracken]

I am curious why an Englishman has a German accent.

[@remlatzargonix1329]

DumbledoreMcCracken ...uhm, I am guessing it's because you don't know what either an English accent nor what a German accent sounds like?

[@edwardjones2202]

Huh?

[@kdub1242]

His accent was quite English. Admittedly, it was not one of the more familiar (to Americans) accents like the many accents of London, or any of the northern ones, but English nonetheless. Berkshire I think. (Speaking of English physicists with less familiar accents, also listen to Dirac. He had a rhotic West Country accent, also less familiar to Americans.)

[@RubyMarkLindMilly]

He dose'nt

[@DumbledoreMcCracken]

@@remlatzargonix1329 I have lived in Germany for years, and been to London at least three times. I'm just reporting what I hear. Perhaps you are the one with the incapacitation.

[@jacobvandijk6525]

From here on, things went terribly wrong in Physics: "If you could calculate something, then the problem was solved" (they thought). Amazingly naive! They were not trying to find a physical explanation at all. Bethe & Dyson seem nice gents to me, but they really took the wrong exit.

[@thefakenewsnetwork8072]

Long live democratic socialism and freedom