Get the latest tech news
Hans Bethe Stumbled Upon Perfect Quantum Theories
Quantum calculations amount to sophisticated estimates. But in 1931, Hans Bethe intuited precisely how a chain of particles would behave — an insight that had far-reaching consequences.
Hans Bethe, a famously careful physicist, built on Bloch’s work to develop a way of perfectly capturing the behavior of certain complex quantum systems. In his final months, Feynman had spoken of an “ambitious dream” to use the Bethe ansatz to understand collisions between high-energy particles, which physicists predicted through tricky approximations. When Ludvig Faddeev, a Russian physicist and master of the Bethe ansatz, gave a talk at Stony Brook University in 1994, he wrote a formula on the blackboard from one of his earlier papers.
Or read this on Hacker News