Biography:Edward Teller

Edward Teller
Teller in 1958
Born	(1908-01-15)January 15, 1908 Budapest, Austria-Hungary
Died	September 9, 2003(2003-09-09) (aged 95) Stanford, California, U.S.
Citizenship	Hungary United States (March 6, 1941)
Alma mater	University of Karlsruhe (BS) University of Munich University of Leipzig (PhD)
Known for	Hydrogen bomb Teller–Ulam design Ashkin–Teller model Brunauer–Emmett–Teller theory Gamow–Teller transition Inglis–Teller equation Jahn–Teller effect Lyddane–Sachs–Teller relation Pöschl–Teller potential Renner–Teller effect Metropolis–Hastings algorithm
Spouse(s)	Augusta Maria Harkanyi (m. 1934; her death 2000)
Children	2
Awards	Presidential Medal of Freedom (2003) National Medal of Science (1982) Eringen Medal (1980) Harvey Prize (1975) Enrico Fermi Award (1962) Albert Einstein Award (1958)
Scientific career
Fields	Physics (theoretical)
Institutions	George Washington University University of Göttingen Bohr Institute University College London Manhattan Project University of Chicago Florida Institute of Technology University of California, Davis University of California, Berkeley Lawrence Livermore Laboratory Hoover Institution
Thesis	Über das Wasserstoffmolekülion (1930)
Doctoral advisor	Werner Heisenberg
Doctoral students	Laszlo Tisza (1932) Charles Critchfield (1939) Marvin L. Goldberger (1948) Boris Jacobsohn (1947) Yang Chen-Ning (1949) Lincoln Wolfenstein (1949) Marshall Rosenbluth (1949) Hans-Peter Dürr (1956)
Other notable students	Jack Steinberger
Signature

Edward Teller (Hungarian: Teller Ede; January 15, 1908 – September 9, 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.

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. 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.

He co-founded the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and was its director or associate director. After his controversial negative testimony in the Oppenheimer security clearance hearing of his former Los Alamos Laboratory superior, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific community ostracized Teller.

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

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), a pianist, and Miksa Teller |archive-date = April 18, 2008}}</ref> and the American Physical Society. Among the honors he received were the Albert Einstein Award in 1958, the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1961, the Enrico Fermi Award in 1962, the Herzl Prize in 1978, the Eringen Medal in 1980, the Harvey Prize in 1975, the National Medal of Science in 1983, the Presidential Citizens Medal in 1989, and the Corvin Chain in 2001. He was also named as part of the group of "US Scientists" who were Time magazine's People of the Year in 1960, and an asteroid, 5006 Teller, is named after him. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush in 2003, less than two months before his death.

His final paper, published posthumously, advocated the construction of a prototype liquid fluoride thorium reactor. The genesis and impetus for this last paper was recounted by the co-author Ralph Moir in 2007.

Teller was portrayed by David Suchet in the 1980 TV miniseries Oppenheimer, by Miki Manojlović in the 1987 TV miniseries Race for the Bomb, and by Benny Safdie in the 2023 biopic film Oppenheimer.

Bibliography

• Our Nuclear Future; Facts, Dangers, and Opportunities (1958), with Albert L. Latter as co-author
• Basic Concepts of Physics (1960)
• The Legacy of Hiroshima (1962), with Allen Brown
• The Constructive Uses of Nuclear Explosions (1968)
• Energy from Heaven and Earth (1979)
• The Pursuit of Simplicity (1980)
• Better a Shield Than a Sword: Perspectives on Defense and Technology (1987)
• Conversations on the Dark Secrets of Physics (1991), with Wendy Teller and Wilson Talley ISBN 978-0306437724
• Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing. 2001. https://archive.org/details/memoirstwentieth0000tell. , with Judith Shoolery

References

Sources

• Blumberg, Stanley; Panos, Louis (1990). Edward Teller: Giant of The Golden Age of Physics. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company. ISBN 0684190427. https://archive.org/details/edwardtellergian00blum. 
• Broad, William J. (1992). Teller's War: The Top-Secret Story Behind the Star Wars Deception. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0671701061. https://archive.org/details/tellerswartopse00broa. 
• Brown, Gerald E.; Lee, Sabine (2009). Hans Albrecht Bethe. Biographical Memoirs. Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences. http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/bethe-hans.pdf. 
• Cohen, Avner (1998). Israel and the bomb. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0231104838. https://archive.org/details/israelbomb00cohe. 
• Dash, Joan (1973). A Life of One's Own: Three Gifted Women and the Men They Married. New York: Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0060109493. OCLC 606211. https://archive.org/details/lifeofonesownthr0000dash. 
• Goncharov, German (2005). "The Extraordinarily Beautiful Physical Principle of Thermonuclear Charge Design (on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the test of RDS-37 – the first Soviet two-stage thermonuclear charge". Physics-Uspekhi 48 (11): 1187–1196. doi:10.1070/PU2005v048n11ABEH005839. Bibcode: 2005PhyU...48.1187G.  Russian text (free download)
• Goodchild, Peter (2004). Edward Teller: The Real Dr. Strangelove. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0674016699. 
• Gorelik, Gennady (2009). "The Paternity of the H-Bombs: Soviet-American Perspectives". Physics in Perspective 11 (2): 169–197. doi:10.1007/s00016-007-0377-8. Bibcode: 2009PhP....11..169G. 
• Herken, Gregg (2002). Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller. New York: Henry Holt and Company. ISBN 0805065881. https://archive.org/details/brotherhoodofbom0000herk. 
• Hoddeson, Lillian; Henriksen, Paul W.; Meade, Roger A.; Westfall, Catherine L. (1993). Critical Assembly: A Technical History of Los Alamos During the Oppenheimer Years, 1943–1945. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521441323. OCLC 26764320. https://archive.org/details/criticalassembly0000unse. 
• Karpin, Michael (2005). The Bomb in the Basement. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0743265955. 
• O'Neill, Dan (1994). The Firecracker Boys. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0312110863. https://archive.org/details/uncertainapril1900nels. 
• Rhodes, Richard (1986). The Making of the Atomic Bomb. London: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0671441337. 
• Rhodes, Richard (1995). Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 068480400X. https://archive.org/details/darksunmakingofh00rhod. 
• Teller, Edward; Shoolery, Judith L. (2001). Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Perseus Publishing. ISBN 073820532X. https://archive.org/details/memoirstwentieth0000tell. 
• Thorpe, Charles (2006). Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226798453. 
• Ulam, S. M (1983). Adventures of a Mathematician. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. ISBN 978-0684143910. OCLC 1528346. https://archive.org/details/adventuresofmath0000ulam. 

Further reading

• Stanley A. Blumberg and Louis G. Panos. Edward Teller : Giant of the Golden Age of Physics; a Biography (Scribner's, 1990)
• Istvan Hargittai, Judging Edward Teller: a Closer Look at One of the Most Influential Scientists of the Twentieth Century (Prometheus, 2010).
• Carl Sagan writes at length about Teller's career in chapter 16 of his book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (Headline, 1996), p. 268–274.
• Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Science and Technology Review contains 10 articles written primarily by Stephen B. Libby in 2007, about Edward Teller's life and contributions to science, to commemorate the 2008 centennial of his birth.
• Heisenberg Sabotaged the Atomic Bomb (Heisenberg hat die Atombombe sabotiert) an interview in German with Edward Teller in: Michael Schaaf: Heisenberg, Hitler und die Bombe. Gespräche mit Zeitzeugen Berlin 2001, ISBN 3928186604.
• Coughlan, Robert (September 6, 1954). "Dr. Edward Teller's Magnificent Obsession". Life. https://books.google.com/books?id=I1QEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA60. Retrieved January 29, 2019. 
• Szilard, Leo. (1987) Toward a Livable World: Leo Szilard and the Crusade for Nuclear Arms Control. Cambridge: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0262192606
• Groves, Leslie R. (1983). Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project. Boston; Massachusetts: Da Capo Press; Perseus Group. ISBN 0-306-80189-2.  paperback reprint, with December 1982 introduction by Edward Teller

External links

• 1986 Audio Interview with Edward Teller by S. L. Sanger Voices of the Manhattan Project
• Annotated Bibliography for Edward Teller from the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues
• "Edward Teller's Role in the Oppenheimer Hearings" interview with Richard Rhodes
• Edward Teller Biography and Interview on American Academy of Achievement
• A radio interview with Edward Teller Aired on the Lewis Burke Frumkes Radio Show in January 1988.
• The Paternity of the H-Bombs: Soviet-American Perspectives
• Edward Teller tells his life story at Web of Stories (video)
• Works by Edward Teller at Project Gutenberg
• Edward Teller on IMDb