Track your comments!
[x]


When you register, comments on your articles and replies to your comments appear here. Register Now!

Sign in to your account
[x]

Not a Scientific Blogging member yet?

Register Now for a Free Scientificblogging.com Account

  • Customize your profile with pictures, banner, a blogroll and more.
  • Leave comments on articles, add other members to your friend lists, chat with people on the site.
  • Write blog posts that can be seen by hundreds of thousands of readers.

It's free and it only takes a minute!

Already a Scientific Blogging member?

Sign In Now

Forgot Your Password?
Banner
Hans Bethe Lectures to His Retirement Community Colleagues
By Michael White | April 20th 2009 08:22 PM | 4 comments | Print | E-mail | Track Comments
.

More Adaptive Complexity articles

All

About Michael White

Welcome to Adaptive Complexity, where I write about genomics, systems biology, evolution, and the connection between science and literature, government, and society.

I'm a biochemist


... Full Bio

I stumbled on this amazing set of videos: physics legend Hans Bethe giving lectures on theoretical physics to his retirement community neighbors.

It's not as crazy as it sounds - a running joke around Ithaca (where I grew up and where Bethe's university, Cornell, is located) is that one of the top physics departments in the US is at the Kendal retirement community in Ithaca. In spite of the miserable weather, a large number of Cornell professors choose to retire there.

Few people can lecture coherently on quantum theory at age 93 (Bethe's age when he gave these lectures in 1999). Hans Bethe was incredible.


Comments

Hank's picture
I couldn't get these to work in my browser so I painstakingly extracted them.  Now I finally get to watch them.   They certainly look like a lot of fun to take in.  In case anyone else has the same problem they are embedded below, but it will take you three hours to watch them all:









Hank Campbell | 04/21/09 | 00:02 AM
adaptivecomplexity's picture
Wow, thanks for putting this up here - this is convenient.

Michael White | 04/22/09 | 13:52 PM
I am going to enjoy this. Many thanks.
I used to live in Saclay, France - a small town where the number of scientists was so large that it was said that you could call anybody at random and ask about the second law of thermodynamics. One evening, I was working late and I got stuck on a question of physics, so I called my closest colleague at home and said "Sorry to call late, but I got this problem..." and I asked my question. Would you believe that a perfect stranger answered me and said: "I don't know who you are, but I can certainly answer that." I had dialed a wrong number.

claude lambert (not verified) | 04/21/09 | 22:05 PM
adaptivecomplexity's picture
I love that story! 

Michael White | 04/22/09 | 13:51 PM

Add a comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <sup> <sub> <a> <em> <strong> <center> <cite> <code> <TH><ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <img> <br> <p> <blockquote> <strike> <object> <param> <embed> <del> <pre> <b> <i> <table> <tbody> <div> <tr> <td> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr> <iframe>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
CAPTCHA
If you register, you will never be bothered to prove you are human again. And you get a real editor toolbar to use instead of this HTML thing that wards off spam bots.