How does the sun shine? It is perhaps one of the first questions a curious child asks about the world, and one that has impelled many a curious child to physics. And, until 1938, it was something that no one could satisfactorily explain. Hans Bethe did so, along with much else, in a long and fruitful career. He was the last of a generation of physicists who changed the world: first in the 1920s and 1930s, by coming up with the entirely new theory of quantum mechanics, and then in the 1940s by proving their relevance in the harshest way imaginable-by creating the atomic bomb.
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