# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/hans-bethe
# Generated: 2026-09-07T20:11:59.925Z

schema: https://schema.org/Person
url: "https://fame.am/person/hans-bethe"
name: "Hans Bethe"
slug: "hans-bethe"
description: "He worked out how stars burn, built the first atomic bombs, then spent decades trying to contain what he'd helped unleash. Bethe wrote the equations that power the sun and the weapons that ended a war — and kept publishing until he was ninety-seven."
tagline: "German-American nuclear physicist"
image: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Hans_Bethe.jpg"
gender: "male"
country:
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  isoCode: "FR"
category:
  name: "Scientists"
  slug: "scientists"
profileType:
  name: "Scientist"
  slug: "scientist"
  entityType: "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q39631"
birthDate: "1906-07-02"
deathDate: "2005-03-06"
livingStatus: "DECEASED"
scores:
  popularity:           63.99
  momentum:             0
  historical:           24.556092
  currentAttention:     0
  sourceConfidence:     65
  profileCompleteness:  75
  trendDirection:       "STABLE"
ranks:
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  country:  null
  category: 197
tags:
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    slug: "scientists"
  - name: "Scientist"
    slug: "scientist"
  - name: "Physics"
    slug: "physics"
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    slug: "science"
  - name: "20th Century"
    slug: "20th-century"
platforms:
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sources:
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    title: "Hans Bethe"
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    title: "Hans Albrecht Bethe"
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    title: "Hans Bethe"
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    title: "Hans Bethe"
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    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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    title: "Hans Bethe"
    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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    title: "Hans Bethe"
    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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    title: "Hans Bethe"
    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  Born in Germany in 1906, Bethe fled to America and landed at Cornell, where he'd stay most of his life. In 1939 he published the paper describing the CNO cycle — the fusion process that keeps heavy stars alight — work that won him the Nobel in 1967. During World War II he ran the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos, calculating critical masses and the implosion mechanics behind Fat Man. He joined the hydrogen bomb project hoping to prove it couldn't work, then stayed on when it could. After that he reversed course: campaigning with Einstein against testing, helping negotiate the 1963 test ban and the 1972 ABM treaty. Along the way he revolutionized quantum electrodynamics with his calculation of the Lamb shift in 1947, advanced neutrino theory, and worked on supernovas. He published his last major paper in his nineties, nearly seventy years after his first.