When Hans Bethe, at the age of 97, asked his long-term collaborator, Gerry Brown, to explain his scientific work to the world, the latter knew that this was a steep task. As the late John Bahcall famously remarked: "If you know his (Bethe's) work, you might be inclined to think he is really several people, all of whom are engaged in a conspiracy to sign their work with the same name." Almost eight decades of original research, hundreds of scientific papers, numerous books, countless reports spanning the key areas of 20th century physics are the impressive record of Hans Bethe's academic work. In answering Bethe's request, the editors enlisted the help of experts in the different research fields, collaborators and friends of this "last giant" of 20th century physics. Hans Bethe and His Physics is the result. It contains discussions of Hans Bethe's work in solid state physics, nuclear physics and astrophysics; it explains his contributions as a science advisor and his stance on energy and nuclear weapons; and it demonstrates his impact as a teacher and mentor to generations of young scientists. While the book's primary aim is to explain the science behind the man, the different articles also allow the reader to take a glimpse at the man behind the science.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of some key developments in the understanding of the nucleon-nucleon interaction and nuclear many-body theory. The main problems at the level of meson exchange physics have largely been solved, and we now have an effective nucleon-nucleon interaction, pioneered in a renormalization group formalism by several of us at Stony Brook and our colleagues at Naples, which is nearly universally accepted as the unique low-momentum interaction that includes all experimental information to date.Our present understanding of these issues is based on a multi-step development in which different scientific insights and a wide range of physical and mathematical methodologies fed into each other. It is best appreciated by looking at the 'steps along the way', starting with the pioneering work of Brueckner and his collaborators that was just as necessary and important as the insightful improvements to Brueckner's theory by Hans Bethe and his students. Moving on from there, microscopic methods for nuclear structure calculations using the Brueckner G-matrix, and later low-momentum nucleon interactions, were developed and applied. With their influential 1967 paper, Brown and Kuo prepared the effective theory that allowed the description of nuclear properties directly from the underlying nucleon-nucleon interaction. Later, the addition of 'Brown-Rho scaling' to the one-boson-exchange model deepened the understanding of nuclear matter saturation, carbon-14 dating and the structure of neutron stars.

In published papers H A Bethe and G E Brown worked out the collapse of large stars and supernova explosions. They went on to evolve binaries of compact stars, finding that in the standard scenario the first formed neutron star always went into a black hole in common envelope evolution. C-H Lee joined them in the study of black hole binaries and gamma ray bursts. They found the black holes to be the fossils of the gamma ray bursts. From their properties they could reconstruct features of the burst and of the accompanying hypernova explosions.

This invaluable book contains 23 papers on astrophysics, chiefly on compact objects, written over 23 years. The papers are accompanied by illuminating commentary. In addition there is an appendix on kaon condensation which the editors believe to be relevant to the equation of state in neutron stars, and to explain why black holes are formed at relatively low masses.