There are a handful of people who soar, whose accomplishments are so off-scale as to nearly defy belief. Hans Bethe (2 July 1906-6 March 2005) was of that caliber. As just one measure of his stature, imagine the task of copying his published opus by hand, for that is how he wrote most of it; an industrious scribe would labor for many years without even tackling his innumerable government studies and reports. This quantitative dimension would be un-remarkable were it not that the mountain of paper would contain seams of previously unknown intellectual gold, nuggets of ingenious invention, brilliant syntheses of new knowledge, technical analyses that altered the geopolitical landscape, and calls to keep morality in mind.
This issue of Physics Today breathes life into the preceding paragraph with articles that sketch Hans’s contributions to most, but certainly not all, of the areas in which he played such seminal roles...
