Edward Teller - WikiHQ

Edward Teller (; 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.

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, an attorney. He attended the Minta Gymnasium in Budapest. 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." Teller was a late talker, but he became very interested in numbers and, for fun, calculated large numbers in his head.

thumb|Teller in his youth|left|226x226px

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.

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. He once stated that the person who was responsible for his becoming a physicist was Herman Mark, who was a visiting professor, 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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.

thumb|The Hungarian passport Teller carried when he entered the United States in 1935.

In 1929, Teller transferred to Leipzig University, where in 1930, he received his PhD in physics under Heisenberg. Teller's dissertation dealt with one of the first accurate quantum mechanical treatments of the hydrogen molecular ion. That year, he befriended Russian physicists George Gamow and Lev Landau. Teller's lifelong friendship with a Czech physicist, George Placzek, was also very important for his scientific and philosophical development. It was Placzek who arranged a summer stay in Rome with Enrico Fermi in 1932, thus orienting Teller's scientific career in nuclear physics. Also in 1930, Teller moved to the University of Göttingen, then one of the world's great centers of physics due to the presence of Max Born and James Franck, but after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, Germany became unsafe for Jewish people, and he left through the aid of the International Rescue Committee. He went briefly to England, and moved for a year to Copenhagen, where he worked under Niels Bohr. In February 1934, he married his long-time girlfriend Augusta Maria "Mici" (pronounced "Mitzi") Harkanyi, who was the sister of a friend. Since Mici was a Calvinist Christian, Edward and she were married in a Calvinist church. He returned to England in September 1934.

Mici had been a student in Pittsburgh and wanted to return to the United States. Her chance came in 1935, when, thanks to George Gamow, Teller was invited to the United States to become a professor of physics at George Washington University, where he worked with Gamow until 1941. At George Washington University in 1937, Teller predicted the Jahn–Teller effect, which distorts molecules in certain situations; this affects the chemical reactions of metals, and in particular the coloration of certain metallic dyes. Teller and Hermann Arthur Jahn analyzed it as a piece of purely mathematical physics. In collaboration with Stephen Brunauer and Paul Hugh Emmett, Teller also made an important contribution to surface physics and chemistry: the so-called Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) isotherm. Teller and Mici became naturalized citizens of the United States on March 6, 1941.

At GWU, Teller organized annually with Gamow the Washington Conferences on Theoretical Physics (1935–1947) that gathered top-level physicists.

When World War II began, Teller wanted to contribute to the war effort. On the advice of the well-known Caltech aerodynamicist and fellow Hungarian émigré Theodore von Kármán, Teller collaborated with his friend Hans Bethe in developing a theory of shock-wave propagation. In later years, their explanation of the behavior of the gas behind such a wave proved valuable to scientists who were studying missile re-entry.

Manhattan Project

thumb|upright|right|Teller's ID badge photo from [[Los Alamos National Laboratory|Los Alamos]]

Los Alamos Laboratory

In 1942, Teller was invited to be part of Robert Oppenheimer's summer planning seminar at the University of California, Berkeley, on the origins of the Manhattan Project, the US effort to develop the first nuclear weapons. A few weeks earlier, Teller had been meeting with his friend and colleague Enrico Fermi about the prospects of atomic warfare, and Fermi had nonchalantly suggested that perhaps a weapon based on nuclear fission could be used to set off an even larger nuclear fusion reaction. Even though he initially explained to Fermi why he thought the idea would not work, Teller was fascinated by the possibility and was quickly bored with the idea of "just" an atomic bomb, even though this was not yet anywhere near completion. At the Berkeley session, Teller diverted the discussion from the fission weapon to the possibility of a fusion weapon—what he called the "Super", an early conception of the hydrogen bomb.

Arthur Compton, the chairman of the University of Chicago physics department, coordinated the uranium research of Columbia University, Princeton University, the University of Chicago, and the University of California, Berkeley. To remove disagreement and duplication, Compton transferred the scientists to the Metallurgical Laboratory at Chicago. Even though Teller and Mici were now American citizens, they had relatives in enemy countries, so Teller did not at first go to Chicago. In early 1943, construction of the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico began. With Oppenheimer as its director, the laboratory's purpose was to design an atomic bomb. Teller moved there in March 1943. In Los Alamos, he annoyed his neighbors by playing piano late at night. Teller was one of the few scientists to watch (with eye protection) the Trinity nuclear test in July 1945, rather than follow orders to lie on the ground with backs turned. He later said that the atomic flash "was as if I had pulled open the curtain in a dark room and broad daylight streamed in".

Decision to drop the bombs

In the days before and after the first demonstration of a nuclear weapon (the Trinity test in July 1945), Hungarian Leo Szilard circulated the Szílard petition, which argued that a demonstration to the Japanese of the new weapon should occur before actual use on Japan, and that the weapons should never be used on people. In response to Szilard's petition, Teller consulted his friend Robert Oppenheimer. Teller believed that Oppenheimer was a natural leader and could help him with such a formidable political problem. Oppenheimer reassured Teller that the nation's fate should be left to the sensible politicians in Washington. Bolstered by Oppenheimer's influence, he decided not to sign the petition.

Teller therefore penned a letter in response to Szilard that read:

On reflection on this letter years later, when he was writing his memoirs, Teller wrote:

Unknown to Teller at the time, four of his colleagues were solicited by the then-secret May to June 1945 Interim Committee. It is this organization that ultimately decided on how the new weapons should initially be used. The committee's four-member Scientific Panel was led by Oppenheimer, and concluded immediate military use on Japan was the best option:

Teller later learned of Oppenheimer's solicitation and his role in the Interim Committee's decision to drop the bombs, having secretly endorsed an immediate military use of the new weapons. This was contrary to the impression that Teller had received when he had personally asked Oppenheimer about the Szilard petition: that the nation's fate should be left to the sensible politicians in Washington. Following Teller's discovery of this, his relationship with his advisor began to deteriorate.

In 1990, the historian Barton Bernstein argued that it is an "unconvincing claim" by Teller that he was a "covert dissenter" to the use of the bomb. In his 2001 Memoirs, Teller claims that he did lobby Oppenheimer, but that Oppenheimer had convinced him that he should take no action and that the scientists should leave military questions in the hands of the military; Teller claims he was not aware that Oppenheimer and other scientists were being consulted as to the actual use of the weapon and implies that Oppenheimer was being hypocritical.

Hydrogen bomb

thumb|left|300px|Physicists at a Manhattan District–sponsored colloquium at [[Los Alamos National Laboratory|Los Alamos on the Super in April 1946. In the front row are (left to right) Norris Bradbury, John Manley, Enrico Fermi and J. M. B. Kellogg. Robert Oppenheimer, in dark coat, is behind Manley; to Oppenheimer's left is Richard Feynman. The Army officer on the left is Colonel Oliver Haywood. |alt=A group of men in shirtsleeves sitting on folding chairs]]

Despite an offer from Norris Bradbury, who had replaced Oppenheimer as the director of Los Alamos in November 1945 to become the head of the Theoretical (T) Division, Teller left Los Alamos on February 1, 1946, to return to the University of Chicago as a professor and close associate of Fermi and Maria Goeppert Mayer. Goeppert-Mayer's work on the internal structure of the elements would earn her the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963.

On April 18–20, 1946, Teller participated in a conference at Los Alamos to review the wartime work on the Super. The properties of thermonuclear fuels such as deuterium and the possible design of a hydrogen bomb were discussed. It was concluded that Teller's assessment of a hydrogen bomb had been too favorable, and that both the quantity of deuterium needed, as well as the radiation losses during deuterium burning, would shed doubt on its workability. Addition of expensive tritium to the thermonuclear mixture would likely lower its ignition temperature, but even so, nobody knew at that time how much tritium would be needed, and whether even tritium addition would encourage heat propagation.

At the end of the conference, despite opposition by some members such as Robert Serber, Teller submitted an optimistic report in which he said that a hydrogen bomb was feasible, and that further work should be encouraged on its development. Fuchs also participated in this conference and transmitted this information to Moscow. With John von Neumann, he contributed the idea of using implosion to ignite the Super. The model of Teller's "classical Super" was so uncertain that Oppenheimer would later say that he wished the Russians were building their own hydrogen bomb based on that design, as it would almost certainly delay their progress on it.

right|thumb|upright|The Teller–Ulam design kept the fission and fusion fuel physically separated from one another, and used X-rays from the primary device "reflected" off the surrounding casing to compress the secondary.

By 1949, Soviet-backed governments had already begun seizing control throughout Eastern Europe, forming such puppet states as the Hungarian People's Republic in Teller's homeland of Hungary, where much of his family still lived, on August 20, 1949. Following the Soviet Union's first test detonation of an atomic bomb on August 29, 1949, President Harry Truman announced a crash development program for a hydrogen bomb.

Teller returned to Los Alamos in 1950 to work on the project. He insisted on involving more theorists, but many of Teller's prominent colleagues, like Fermi and Oppenheimer, were sure that the project of the H-bomb was technically infeasible and politically undesirable. None of the available designs was yet workable. However, Soviet scientists who had worked on their own hydrogen bomb have claimed that they developed it independently.

In 1950, calculations by the Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam and his collaborator Cornelius Everett, along with confirmations by Fermi, had shown that not only was Teller's earlier estimate of the quantity of tritium needed for the reaction to begin too low, but that even with more tritium, the energy loss in the fusion process would be too great to enable the fusion reaction to propagate. In 1951, Teller and Ulam made a breakthrough and invented a new design, proposed in a classified March 1951 paper, On Heterocatalytic Detonations I: Hydrodynamic Lenses and Radiation Mirrors, for a practical megaton-range H-bomb. The exact contribution provided respectively from Ulam and Teller to what became known as the Teller–Ulam design is not definitively known in the public domain, and the exact contributions of each and how the final idea was arrived upon have been a point of dispute in both public and classified discussions since the early 1950s.

In an interview with Scientific American from 1999, Teller told the reporter:

thumb|Mike [[mushroom cloud, yielding 10.4 megatons.]]

During the Manhattan Project, Teller advocated the development of a bomb using uranium hydride, which many of his fellow theorists said would be unlikely to work. At Livermore, Teller continued work on the uranium hydride bomb, and the result was a dud. Ulam once wrote to a colleague about an idea he had shared with Teller: "Edward is full of enthusiasm about these possibilities; this is perhaps an indication they will not work." Fermi once said that Teller was the only monomaniac he knew who had several manias.

Carey Sublette of Nuclear Weapon Archive argues that Ulam came up with the radiation implosion compression design of thermonuclear weapons, but that, on the other hand, Teller has gotten little credit for being the first to propose fusion boosting in 1945, which is essential for miniaturization and reliability and is used in all of today's nuclear weapons.

In the early 1950s Edward Teller proposed project Sundial at a meeting of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, the bomb was intended to have a yield of 10 gigatons of TNT, while its counterpart, Gnomon, was intended to have a yield of 1 gigaton. Neither device was ever built or tested.

Oppenheimer controversy

thumb|right|upright|Teller testified about [[J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1954.]]

Teller became controversial in 1954 when he testified against Oppenheimer at Oppenheimer's security clearance hearing. Teller had clashed with Oppenheimer many times at Los Alamos over issues relating both to fission and fusion research, and, during Oppenheimer's hearing, he was the only member of the scientific community to state that Oppenheimer should not be granted security clearance.

Asked at the hearing by Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) attorney Roger Robb whether he was planning "to suggest that Dr. Oppenheimer is disloyal to the United States", Teller replied that:

He was immediately asked whether he believed that Oppenheimer was a "security risk", to which he testified: