Saturday, January 21, 2006

Hans Bethe 100th anniversary seminar on 1/23/06

On Monday 1/23, Caltech his hosting (for the Caltech community, not for the public) a seminar commemorating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe (1906-2005). (Bethe used to visit Caltech annually.)

Besides his numerous scientific (and other) accomplishments, Bethe is often credited with building Cornell's physics department into a research powerhouse. I saw him give a talk once, and the professor (Persis Drell, daughter of Sidney) of a QM course I was auditing tried to get him to come to dinner with the class at the end of the semester. (She was able to get David Mermin to come, but Bethe apparently couldn't make it. Mermin can be a highly amusing person, by the way, but he can be overly pholosophical at times.)

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