Hans Bethe

His life nearly spanning the 20th century and productively extending into the 21st, Hans Bethe (1906-2005), née Hans Albrecht Bethe, earned a position in the highest rank of pioneer physicists of the 20th century. He devoted much of intellectual energy in helping develop the theory of atomic nuclei and of nuclear reactions. That work led him to discover the reactions in the sun that delivers energy to its surrounding, including Earth, for which discovery, and for his discovery of the different set of nuclear reactions that generates the radiant energy of stars more massive than the sun, and for his many contributions to the theory of nuclear reactions, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1967, as sole recipient. He concluded his Nobel Lecture as follows:

If all this is true, stars have a life cycle much like animals. They get born, they grow, they go through a definite internal development, and finally they die, to give back the material of which they are made so that new stars may live.

Life and work
Han Bethe joined humanity in Strasbourg, Alsace-Lorraine, born on July 2, 1906, and died in Ithaca, New York, on March 6, 2005, leaving humanity with a invaluable legacy of knowledge about the nature of the universe and of humanity itself.