Famous First Words is a recurring LabKitty feature in which we have a gander at the opening line of an historic scientific article.
The sun isn't all rainbows and photosynthesis, it's also a vicious inferno that will someday kill us all. Perhaps that explains humankind's obsession with the thing. From Helios driving it across the sky in his golden chariot to other suns shining through pinholes in the firmament, people have been trying to explain stars for millennia and mostly getting it wrong. We only figured out what was really going on up there in 1939, when Hans Bethe published his stellar paper on thermonuclear reactions. The sun is not "burning" in any conventional sense; it is mostly a giant ball of hydrogen fusing to produce helium and other things besides. This had been known for some time but Bethe worked out the reactions in detail, concluding most of a star's energy is derived from the participation of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen -- the eponymous CNO cycle.
As it happened, Bethe's description was also relevant to the hydrogen bomb. Alas, studying science for science's sake has never been an easy sell. I imagine Hans' (B) pitch to Congress (C) went something like this:
B: One research grant, please.
C: For what?
B: I want to figure out how stars shine.
C: Why would anyone care about that?
B: Because it's beautiful.
C: Get lost, hippy.
B: It will also make America the most powerful nation on Earth.
C: Check's in the mail!
Nerd lore has it while the paper was in press, Bethe quipped to his squeeze as they lay under the stars that only he understood how they shine. So it goes. The twinkle of a star reduced to the CNO cycle, the graceful arc of a cannonball reduced to a differential equation, the penetrating glare of a shaped charge reduced to an exercise in visco-plastic Taylor instability. Some say science drains the beauty from all things. A cosmic microtome that leaves your soul to bleed. A grant rejection that drowns the tender reed. But I say science is a flower, and you its only seed.
Here's how the paper opens:
The sun isn't all rainbows and photosynthesis, it's also a vicious inferno that will someday kill us all. Perhaps that explains humankind's obsession with the thing. From Helios driving it across the sky in his golden chariot to other suns shining through pinholes in the firmament, people have been trying to explain stars for millennia and mostly getting it wrong. We only figured out what was really going on up there in 1939, when Hans Bethe published his stellar paper on thermonuclear reactions. The sun is not "burning" in any conventional sense; it is mostly a giant ball of hydrogen fusing to produce helium and other things besides. This had been known for some time but Bethe worked out the reactions in detail, concluding most of a star's energy is derived from the participation of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen -- the eponymous CNO cycle.
As it happened, Bethe's description was also relevant to the hydrogen bomb. Alas, studying science for science's sake has never been an easy sell. I imagine Hans' (B) pitch to Congress (C) went something like this:
B: One research grant, please.
C: For what?
B: I want to figure out how stars shine.
C: Why would anyone care about that?
B: Because it's beautiful.
C: Get lost, hippy.
B: It will also make America the most powerful nation on Earth.
C: Check's in the mail!
Nerd lore has it while the paper was in press, Bethe quipped to his squeeze as they lay under the stars that only he understood how they shine. So it goes. The twinkle of a star reduced to the CNO cycle, the graceful arc of a cannonball reduced to a differential equation, the penetrating glare of a shaped charge reduced to an exercise in visco-plastic Taylor instability. Some say science drains the beauty from all things. A cosmic microtome that leaves your soul to bleed. A grant rejection that drowns the tender reed. But I say science is a flower, and you its only seed.
Here's how the paper opens:
Energy Production in Stars
H. Bethe. Physical Review 55:434-456. (1939)
H. Bethe. Physical Review 55:434-456. (1939)
The progress of nuclear physics in the last few years makes it possible to decide rather definitely which processes can and which cannot occur in the interior of stars.
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