Hans Bethe - Friendship with Nevill Mott at Cambridge (27/158)

To hear more of Hans Bethe’s stories, go to the playlist: German-born theoretical physicist Hans Bethe (1906-2005) was one of the first scientists to join the Manhattan Project, later strongly advocating nuclear disarmament. In 1967, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. [Listener: Sam Schweber; date recorded: 1996] TRANSCRIPT: Nevill Mott was a very important person. He was about my age. He was interested in similar things. As a matter of fact he had been interested mostly in collision phenomena and had written a very good book - I think it had already been written - about atomic collisions with Massey, and he and I got along famously. We went for walks together and occasionally for bicycle rides and we became very good friends. He was a theorist. I also became a good friend of Blackett but he was of... many years older than I, while Mott was my age and had very