Edward Teller
Edward Teller | |
|---|---|
 Teller in 1958 | |
| Born | Teller Ede January 15, 1908 |
| Died | September 9, 2003 (aged 95) Stanford, California, U.S. |
| Citizenship |
|
| Education | |
| Known for | |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 2 |
| Awards |
|
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Physics (theoretical) |
| Workplaces | |
| Thesis | Über das Wasserstoffmolekülion (1930) |
| Werner Heisenberg | |
Doctoral students |
|
Other notable students | Jack Steinberger |
| Signature | |
 | |
| Part of a series on |
| Nuclear weapons of Israel |
|---|
.jpg){kind=spacer} |
Edward Teller (Hungarian: Teller Ede; 15 January 1908 – 9 September 2003) was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist and chemical engineer who is known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb" and one of the creators of the Teller–Ulam design inspired by Stanisław Ulam.
Born in Austria-Hungary in 1908, Teller emigrated to the US in the 1930s, one of the many so-called "Martians", a group of Hungarian scientist émigrés. He made numerous contributions to nuclear and molecular physics, spectroscopy, and surface physics. His extension of Enrico Fermi's theory of beta decay, in the form of Gamow–Teller transitions, provided an important stepping stone in its application, while the Jahn–Teller effect and Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) theory have retained their original formulation and are mainstays in physics and chemistry.[1]
Teller made contributions to Thomas–Fermi theory, the precursor of density functional theory, a standard tool in the quantum mechanical treatment of complex molecules. In 1953, with Nicholas Metropolis, Arianna Rosenbluth, Marshall Rosenbluth, and Augusta Teller, Teller co-authored a paper that is a starting point for the application of the Monte Carlo method to statistical mechanics and the Markov chain Monte Carlo literature in Bayesian statistics.[2] Teller was an early member of the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb. He made a concerted push to develop fusion-based weapons, but ultimately fusion bombs only appeared after World War II. To get support for the hydrogen bomb project, Teller supported and worked on the George shot of the Operation Greenhouse nuclear tests, resulting in the world's first thermonuclear burn.[3] He co-founded the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and was its director or associate director.
Teller continued to find support from the US government and military research establishment, particularly for his advocacy for nuclear power development, a strong nuclear arsenal, and a vigorous nuclear testing program. In his later years, he advocated controversial technological solutions to military and civilian problems, including a plan to excavate an artificial harbor in Alaska using a thermonuclear explosive in what was called Project Chariot, and Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. Teller was a recipient of the Enrico Fermi Award and Albert Einstein Award. He died in 2003, at 95.
Early life and work
[edit]Ede Teller was born on January 15, 1908, in Budapest, then part of Austria-Hungary, into a Jewish family. His parents were Ilona (née Deutsch),[4][5] a pianist, and Miksa Teller, an attorney.[6] He attended the Minta Gymnasium in Budapest.[7] Teller was an agnostic. "Religion was not an issue in my family", he later wrote, "indeed, it was never discussed. My only religious training came because the Minta required that all students take classes in their respective religions. My family celebrated one holiday, the Day of Atonement, when we all fasted. Yet my father said prayers for his parents on Saturdays and on all the Jewish holidays. The idea of God that I absorbed was that it would be wonderful if He existed: We needed Him desperately but had not seen Him in many thousands of years."[8] Teller was a late talker, but he became very interested in numbers and, for fun, calculated large numbers in his head.[9]
.jpg)
Teller left Hungary for Germany in 1926, partly due to the discriminatory numerus clausus rule under Miklós Horthy's regime. The political climate and revolutions in Hungary during his youth instilled a lingering animosity toward Communism and Fascism.[10]
From 1926 to 1928, Teller studied mathematics and chemistry at the University of Karlsruhe (TH), from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering.[11][12] He once stated that the person who was responsible for his becoming a physicist was Herman Mark, who was a visiting professor,[13] after hearing lectures on molecular spectroscopy where Mark made it clear to him that it was new ideas in physics that were radically changing the frontier of chemistry.[14] Mark was an expert in polymer chemistry, a field which is essential to understanding biochemistry, and Mark taught him about the leading breakthroughs in quantum physics made by Louis de Broglie, among others. It was his exposure to Mark's lectures that initially motivated Teller to switch to physics.[15] After informing his father of his intent to switch, his father was so concerned that he traveled to visit him and speak with his professors at the school. While a degree in chemical engineering was a sure path to a well-paying job at chemical companies, there was no such clear-cut route for a career with a degree in physics. He was not privy to the discussions his father had with his professors, but the result was that he got his father's permission to become a physicist.[16]
Teller then attended the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, where he studied physics under Arnold Sommerfeld. In 1928, while still a student at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, he fell under a streetcar and his right foot was nearly severed. For the rest of his life, he walked with a limp, and on occasion he wore a prosthetic foot.[17][18] The painkillers he was taking were interfering with his thinking, so he decided to stop taking them, instead using his willpower to deal with the pain, including use of the placebo effect, by which he convinced himself that he had taken painkillers rather than water.[19] Werner Heisenberg said that it was the hardiness of Teller's spirit, rather than stoicism, that allowed him to cope so well with the accident.[20]