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Biographical Memoirs Volume 90 (2009) / Chapter Skim
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EDWARD TELLER
Pages 412-431

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From page 412...
... Photograph courtesy Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.
From page 413...
... He lived through the turbulent years of World War I, the dismemberment of the AustroHungarian Empire, the short-lived Communist regime of Bela 413
From page 414...
... That was why he saw it as his inescapable duty to keep America armed with the most effective weapons, with bombs for deterring attack, and with missiles for active defense. The springtime years of Teller's professional life, the years when he was happiest with his work and his friends, were the seven years between 1926 and 1933 that he spent as a student in Germany.
From page 415...
... When Teller joined the group of young people working at Leipzig with Heisenberg as leader, Heisenberg was 28. He had invented quantum mechanics in 1925 and then invited all and sundry to join him in using quantum mechanics to understand the workings of nature.
From page 416...
... When Hitler took power in 1933, Teller moved to Copenhagen. There he met George Gamow, a young Russian who had been the first to apply quantum mechanics to nuclear physics.
From page 417...
... Twenty years later it became the basis for a unified theory of weak interactions. One of Teller's friends in Washington was Merle Tuve, an American and a first-rate physicist who built particle accelerators and used them to do nuclear experiments at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism of the Carnegie Institution.
From page 418...
... That year's meeting was supposed to be devoted to low-temperature physics. On the first morning of the meeting Gamow introduced Niels Bohr, who had just arrived on a ship from Denmark, and Bohr told the assembled physicists the news of the discovery of fission of uranium in Germany a month before.
From page 419...
... In February 1939 Teller's friend Leo Szilard called him from New York to announce that he had found abundant secondary neutrons emitted in uranium fission. This meant that an explosive nuclear chain reaction was certainly possible.
From page 420...
... As a result, an official Advisory Committee on Uranium was established, and the bureaucratic machinery that later grew into the Manhattan Project slowly began to grind. Teller worked on nuclear energy from 1939 to 1945: two years at Columbia University helping Fermi design the first nuclear reactor, two years at the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago helping to design the Hanford plutonium production reactors, and two years at Los Alamos National Laboratory working on bombs.
From page 421...
... He enjoyed the return to academic life and especially enjoyed interacting with a brilliant bunch of students, including Chen Ning Yang, Tsung Dao Lee, Marshall Rosenbluth, and Marvin Goldberger. Two of his closest friends, Enrico Fermi and Maria Mayer, were colleagues.
From page 422...
... In Chicago I found without difficulty the answer. I started a long argument with him about political questions, and it appears that he is an ardent supporter of the ‘World Government' movement, an organization which preaches salvation in the form of a world government, to be set up in the near future with or without Russia, and to have sovereign powers over the economic and social policies of its member nations.
From page 423...
... Not because I feel subjectively that I must have help, but because I know objectively that we are in a situation in which any sane person must and does throw up his hands and only the crazy ones keep going." In 1950 electronic computers were able to simulate in a rough fashion the Classical Super design for a hydrogen bomb and showed that it did not work. George Gamow drew a famous cartoon of Teller trying to set fire to a wet piece of rock with a match.
From page 424...
... A much larger fraction of Livermore bomb tests failed, but Teller considered failed tests a badge of honor rather than a disgrace. In the end the Livermore-designed weapons proved to be as rugged and reliable as those designed at Los Alamos.
From page 425...
... And I saw no reason why people who disagreed with him should condemn him for speaking his mind. Teller's estrangement from the community of physicists became worse when three of his closest friends, Enrico Fermi, John von Neumann, and Ernest Lawrence, happened to die prematurely within a few years after the Oppenheimer hearings.
From page 426...
... Unfortunately, the nuclear power industry was stuck with designs borrowed from the submarine-propulsion reactor program of Admiral Rickover, and never considered the TRIGA design as a serious competitor. Many years later Teller and his colleagues at Livermore developed designs for safe nuclear power reactors that could be buried deep underground, operated with a single loading of fuel for 50 years, never refueled, and never unloaded.
From page 427...
... The PLOWSHARE program aimed to use nuclear explosions to excavate large masses of dirt or rock cheaply, the main purpose being to create artificial harbors and canals. To minimize the contamination of the landscape by radioactive fallout, the PLOWSHARE experts designed bombs whose explosive yield came mostly from fusion and as little as possible from fission.
From page 428...
... In 1975 Teller retired from Livermore and became a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution on the campus of Stanford University. Here he spent the sunset years of his life, in close touch with the work of the laboratory at Livermore, writing books, and giving lectures, politically active to the end, still fighting for strategic defense and nuclear energy.
From page 429...
... T E L L E R EDWARD 429 was welcomed not only as a national hero but as a long lost brother. He was as proud of Hungary as Hungary was proud of him.
From page 430...
... 61:458-480. 1931 Der Diamagnetismus von freien Elektronen.


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