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.

Biography

Edward Teller was born to Max Teller and Idona Deutsch who both were assimilated Hungarian Jews. Edward's mother was an accomplished piano player who gave up her aspirations of 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 Bela 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 gymnasium Minta (an advanced German type of high school) in 1918, 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 housed at that time 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 an artificial one, that did not keep him from being a good table tennis player. He also was a very good piano player.

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 main 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.

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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)