H-Net Review Publication: Berger on Schweber, 'Nuclear Forces: The Making of the Physicist Hans Bethe'
S. S. Schweber.
Nuclear Forces: The Making of the Physicist Hans Bethe. Cambridge
Harvard University Press, 2012.
608 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN
978-0-674-06587-1.
Reviewed by Al Berger (University of North Dakota,
History Department) Published on H-War (March, 2013) Commissioned by Margaret
Sankey
Becoming Hans Bethe
This book is not a direct study of war or military
history. It has something to say about what science and war were doing to each
other as they became closely associated at the beginning of the twentieth
century; nevertheless, readers seeking new tales of the Manhattan Project will
not find them here. To be sure, physics Nobel laureate Hans Bethe became the
public character he did because he was director of the Theoretical Division at
the Los Alamos laboratory that built the first atomic bombs. However, this book
is not about that part of Bethe's life; in fact, it mentions it only
tangentially.
Silvan Schweber makes his academic homes in departments
of physics and programs in the history of science and ideas. He has written elsewhere
about the "military" side of Bethe's career, tracing the almost, but
not quite completely parallel path he traveled alongside his friend and
colleague, J. Robert Oppenheimer.[1] _Nuclear Forces_ is a formidable work that
reaches its conclusion just before that part of Bethe's life began.
This book is an intellectual history, alongside a history
of the social and cultural life of Europe's academic middle class between the
last years of Otto von Bismarck's regime and the first of Adolf Hitler's. Schweber's
focus is, indeed, the making of the physicist Hans Bethe, as the first page
full of mathematical reasoning and equations will make clear. The reader who
cannot follow the physics and mathematics will lose much of this book The reader who can will see a concise,
mathematical history of twentieth-century theoretical physics that outlines the
intellectual, scientific issues that people in the field sought to resolve
before so many of them were caught up in the atomic bomb business. (For good
measure, Schweber publishes Hans Bethe's doctoral dissertation as an appendix.)
That is not all there is to say, however. Your reviewer
is among those who cannot follow the math; but Schweber is clear enough about
what he is doing with it, and the other very well-documented aspects of Bethe's
life and career. Bethe, he writes, is "representative of the role played
by physicists during the twentieth century," and the biography "an
attempt to understand, interpret, and communicate the meaning of and the
reasons for Bethe's involvement ... in the shaping of the history of the
twentieth century" (p. 5).
These are not small objectives. Before the century had
even begun the physical science disciplines had helped remake the Euro-Atlantic
world in myriad material, economic, and political ways. They were part of
intellectual life in that same community, and their new discoveries came with
philosophical implications that were uncomfortable in that new century.
Moreover, Schweber insists that he must "situate Bethe in the institutions
and networks that made his career possible" (p. 5). The most important of
these are the German middle class and its families and the German university
system.
Bethe was thoroughly wrapped up in both from birth; his
father Albrecht was a physiologist who held posts at Strassburg and Kiel before
becoming rector at the University of Frankfurt; his mother, a one-time artist
from whom Albrecht Bethe became estranged and to whom young Hans remained
constantly devoted.
Schweber's long, closely reasoned narrative, based very
thoroughly on files of personal correspondence, argues that Bethe's life was
shaped on the one hand by the idea of _bildung--_the German concept of
"self-cultivation and self-formation" (p. 81) descended from the
Enlightenment and the discomforting arrival of the industrial and the French
revolutions--and on the other by the high-powered and competitive world of the
German university system. According the Schweber, _bildung_ was an important
aspect of the German middle class, especially the educated middle classes of
the Jewish community as they increasingly sought to assimilate to mainstream
German society. At the same time, in the universities, self-cultivation was to
take place under the close auspices of a cadre of autocratic _Herr Professor_s.
Bethe worked, successfully, under Arnold Sommerfeld, one
of the most autocratic of them all; and he learned the rules of the game at the
same time he was developing his own scientific insights. As he worked, he
learned to attack questions he knew he could answer. He also traveled
throughout the transnational scientific world of Europe, Britain, and the
United States before he moved to Cornell University in upstate New York in
1935. (Bethe never considered himself Jewish and he was never religious, but
Bethe's mother was Jewish and he was cast out of German universities under Nazi
racial
laws.) Even readers seeking something other than Bethe's
personal story or professional accomplishments may find this aspect of the
story useful in an unexpected way. Eventually, Bethe came to enjoy the freer,
more open, and more cooperative atmospheres of universities in Italy, Britain,
and the United States more than he did the seigniorial rule of his German
mentors; and he came to believe that openness and cooperation among physicists
produced more insight. This angle may help resolve the vexing question of why
Germany, of all countries, is the only nation that began work on nuclear
weapons and failed to produce them.
Hans Bethe was a most significant physicist in
theoretical research and in the design of the first atomic and hydrogen
bombs--even if his life had much less of the drama that engulfed friends and
contemporaries like Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller. Schweber's dry but
friendly, thorough, and rigorous biography will interest historians of science
more than historians of war and nuclear weapons, but it will illuminate the
work of either group.
Note
[1]. Silvan S. Schweber, _In the Shadow of the Bomb: Oppenheimer,
Bethe, and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientist, _Princeton Series in
Physics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
Citation: Al Berger. Review of Schweber, S. S., _Nuclear
Forces: The Making of the Physicist Hans Bethe_. H-War, H-Net Reviews. March,
2013.