Edward Teller

Edward Teller was an eminent and controversial theoretical physicist. He was born as Teller Ede in Budapest (Hungary) on January 15, 1908. He died in his home on the Stanford campus (Palo Alto, California) on September 9, 2003.

Edward Teller was one of the most controversial scientists of the 20th century because of his role as the main developer of the hydrogen bomb, his outspoken defense of an unassailable nuclear arsenal, and support for President Reagan's Strategic Defensive Initiative ("Star Wars"). During the McCarthy era he alienated many of his colleagues by his testimony in the 1954 security clearance hearings of J. Robert Oppenheimer, his former colleague and director of the Los Alamos Laboratory.

Edward Teller in 1958
Courtesy Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Biography

Youth

Edward Teller was born to Max Teller and Idona Deutsch, who both were assimilated Hungarian Jews. Edward's mother Idona was an accomplished pianist who gave up her aspirations to a concert career when she married Edward's father, who was a lawyer. As a young boy Edward experienced a short and fierce communist dictatorship under Béla Kun (March 21, 1919 – August 1, 1919); it has been suggested that his rabid aversion of communism in later life was rooted in this experience. The Hungarian communists were soon ousted by Rear Admiral Miklós Horthy who headed a fascist regime until the end of World War II.

Edward entered in 1918 the famous gymnasium "Minta" (an advanced German type of high school founded by the father of Theodore von Kármán), where he met his later wife Augusta Maria ("Mici") Harkanyi, who was a sister of one of Edward's closest friends. The Harkanyis were from Jewish descent but had converted to Christianity. After finishing the gymnasium, Edward spent a few months at the university in Budapest, but moved early January 1926 to Karlsruhe in Germany to study chemical engineering. Karlsruhe was at that time the seat of one of the most outstanding technical universities of the country. In the spring of 1928 Edward had enough of chemical engineering and moved to Munich to study theoretical physics under Arnold Sommerfeld, a great mathematical physicist who contributed importantly to the development of quantum mechanics. Shortly after his arrival in Munich, Edward jumped of a moving streetcar, stumbled, and got his right foot ran over by the streetcar that he jumped from. The doctors were unable to save his foot, so for the rest of his life he had a prosthetic one, that did not keep him from being a good table tennis player. He also was a very good pianist.

When, after four months, Edward had recovered, he decided to switch universities again and to go to Leipzig to do his Ph.D work under Werner Heisenberg, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, who a year earlier had been appointed in Leipzig to the chair of theoretical physics. He finished his doctorate work in the amazingly short period of just over a year and got his degree early 1930, just 22 years old. His Ph.D. work, which was on the excited states of the one-electron system H₂⁺, was his first publication.

Young scientist

After obtaining his doctorate Teller moved to the birth place of quantum mechanics, the theoretical physics institute of the University of Göttingen. Here he worked mainly on theoretical chemistry subjects. For instance, he wrote with the Russian physicist Georg Rumer and the German mathematician Hermann Weyl about chemical bonding theory from the point of view of group theory. He worked with the German experimental spectroscopist Gerhard Herzberg on the effect of the vibrations of molecules on electronic transitions, which was one of the first papers that went beyond the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. With the Czech physicist George Placzek he worked on the theory of Raman spectra He advised a Göttinger student, Rudolph Renner, on his PhD research. This resulted in a paper (without Teller) about an effect that later came to be known as the Renner-Teller effect.

In the early spring of 1933 all Jewish personnel of all German universities were fired, including Teller. He found a lecturer position at the Sir William Ramsay Laboratories of Physical and Inorganic Chemistry, University College London, but went soon after his appointment to Copenhagen because he had received a Rockefeller stipend for that purpose. In Copenhagen he spent an 8 months sabbatical leave at the institute of Niels Bohr. While in Denmark, Eduard (as he called himself at that time) married on February 26, 1934 his old girlfriend Mici Harkanyi. Back in London at the William Ramsay Lab, he met Hermann Jahn, a British physicist of German descent, who worked at the Royal Institution. The two wrote a paper together containing material that may well be Teller's most famous contribution to basic science: the Jahn-Teller effect. Briefly, the effect is that a highly symmetric non-linear molecule distorts to a geometry of lower symmetry when the electronic state of the molecule is degenerate, that is, when there is more than one electronic wave function of the same energy describing the state of the molecule. The geometry distortion causes the degeneracy to be lifted.

Move to the USA

Soon after his return to London, Teller received an invitation to become full professor at George Washington University. His friend, the Russian emigré George Gamow, at that time professor of physics at this university, had recommended him to the university authorities, who were looking for an expansion of their physics department with a few theoreticians. After some deliberation—Mici and Edward had just bought a house in London—they decided to cross the Atlantic and to continue their life in the US. In Washington D.C., where the Tellers arrived in August 1935, Edward started a fruitful cooperation with George Gamow. In 1936 they published an important work in nuclear physics about—what is now known as—the Gamow-Teller decay of nuclei. The work was followed by several astrophysical papers on red giants and rates of thermonuclear reactions occurring in stars.

In the summer of 1939 Teller was teaching physics at Columbia University in New York where he met his old Hungarian friends Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner. The three physicists were quite excited about the recent discovery (December 1938) of nuclear fission (splitting of nuclei) and especially Szilard foresaw the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction that would liberate enormous amounts of energy. The three Jewish Hungarians decided that the American president Franklin D. Roosevelt should be informed about the possibility of an atomic bomb, especially because Nazi Germany could be expected to build one, and they thought that Einstein, with his enormous prestige, would be the person to write a letter to the president. First Szilard and Wigner visited Einstein, who was summering on Long Island, and when a second visit to Einstein appeared necessary, Teller drove Szilard to Einstein and took notes (in German) and edited the letter. This, undersigned by Einstein, was handed on October 11, 1939 to the president by Alexander Sachs, a personal friend of the president. Historians are divided about the influence that Einstein's letter had on the decision to start the Manhattan project two years later. For instance, Abraham Pais, an important biographer of Einstein's, believes that its influence was "marginal".

On March 4, 1941 after Hitler had occupied much of Europe and a few months before he ordered the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Tellers became US citizens.

Atomic bomb

In 1941 Teller moved to Columbia University to cooperate with Enrico Fermi on nuclear fission and in 1943 he moved with Fermi to the University of Chicago to work on a nuclear reactor; here he met his old friend Leo Szilard again who was also working on it. In June 1942, Teller was invited together with other prominent theoretical physicists to be part of Robert Oppenheimer's top secret summer seminar at University of California Berkeley; the seminar was an early stage of the Manhattan Project. They reviewed the general theory of fission reactions and quickly concluded that a fission bomb was feasible; further they provided the theoretical basis for the design of such a bomb. The conference convinced Oppenheimer of the benefits of having a single centralized laboratory to manage the research for the bomb project rather than having specialists spread out at different sites across the United States. After Oppenheimer had found a remote site in New Mexico at Los Alamos for the laboratory that he would be the scientific director of, the work on construction of the atomic bomb started in earnest. April 1943 the Tellers moved as one of the first families to Los Alamos where Edward became group leader in the Theoretical Physics division. However, already then, Teller's obsession with the fusion bomb caused tensions with others, particularly with Hans Bethe, the division leader who pragmatically aimed for the development of a fission bomb before he would even contemplate the use of thermonuclear fusion reactions for weapons. Because of his early obsession with thermonuclear weapons ("hydrogen bombs"), Teller's contributions to the development of the atomic bomb turned out to be less than could be expected from a man with his extraordinary talents.

Since the new director of Los Alamos, Norris Bradbury—who after the war had succeeded Oppenheimer—and prominent scientists as Oppenheimer and Bethe, refused to initiate a crash program on the development of hydrogen bombs, Teller left Los Alamos on the first of February 1946 to return to the University of Chicago where he would cooperate with Enrico Fermi and Maria Goeppert-Mayer, but he remained consultant at Los Alamos.

Hydrogen bomb

Almost a year after the end of WW II (April 18-20, 1946) a secret conference was held at Los Alamos in which the properties of thermonuclear fuels, such as deuterium and tritium, and a design by Teller of a thermonuclear device (the "Super") were discussed. Ironically, one of the participants of this super secret seminar was Klaus Fuchs, who later turned out be a Soviet spy. At the seminar it was concluded that prohibitive amounts of the very rare and expensive isotope tritium would be needed to start a fusion chain reaction of deuterium nuclei. All participants agreed that the ignition of the deuterium-tritium mixture requires so much energy that it can only be delivered by a conventional atomic explosion. Fuchs transmitted this information and Teller's design of the super to Moscow, but the theoretical foundation of the super was so shaky that Oppenheimer later said that he wished that the Soviets had been listening better to Klaus Fuchs. A month after the conference at Los Alamos, Teller drafted a conference report that concluded that a hydrogen bomb was feasible and that its development must be part of the highest national policy. The government, however, did not comply; for several years after the war no development work on thermonuclear devices was carried out in the USA.

(To be continued)

Bibliography

• S. A. Blumberg and G. Owens, The Life and Times of Edward Teller, G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York (1976)
• Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun, Simon & Schuster, Inc. New York (1995)
• S. B. Libby and M. S. Weiss, Edward Teller's Scientific Life, Physics Today, vol. 57(8) pp. 45–50 (2004)
• H. Brown and M. May, Edward Teller in the Public Arena, Physics Today, vol. 57(8) pp. 51–53 (2004)

External link

Edward Teller's Scientific Legacy Lecture on Teller's achievements in physics by Stephen B. Libby, 2005