Originally shared by Kevin Clift
Retirement Quantum Theory
At the age of 93 himself, and about five years before his death in 2005, the Nobel prize-winning Physicist Hans Bethe presented three lectures on Quantum Theory to the residents of the Kendal of Ithaca retirement home near his own Cornell University. In these lectures he deliberately chose to minimize the Maths and focus instead on the human and historical perspectives of the development of Quantum Theory, including anecdotes recalling Bohr, Born, de Broglie, Dirac, Heisenberg and Schrödinger.
The lectures with accompanying slides and an introduction and appreciation have been provided online by Cornell. Click on the pictures to read a brief summary of each video or stream it directly.
Formalized during a burst of intellectual activity during the 1920s, quantum theory had immediate success explaining experimental results in atomic and nuclear physics. However, physicists were aware that much work remained to clarify the conceptual foundations of the theory.
Videos Here: http://bethe.cornell.edu/index.html
Obituary: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/mar/08/guardianobituaries.nuclear
Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hans_Bethe_ID_badge.png