I got to know Hans Bethe in the 1950s, when I was a lodger at the home of Rudolf and Eugenia Peierls in Birmingham, England. Bethe and Peierls had been close friends ever since they were graduate students together under Arnold Sommerfeld; the two went on to devise a comprehensive theory of the deuteron. Their comradeship affected many people, including some of the authors in this special issue of Physics Today. My room still had University of Canberra stationery from when Edwin Salpeter lived with the Peierlses, and I bought the bicycle Freeman Dyson had left.
During his 1955 sabbatical at the University of Cambridge, Hans worked on the nuclear many-body problem and, in particular, on difficulties associated with Brueckner theory. (See the article by John Negele on page 58.) Shortly after that, I began work on applying to finite nuclei the effective interactions he had obtained for infinite...
