Edward Teller

Edward Teller: The Physicist Who Kept Building

In April 1954, asked at a security hearing whether he thought J. Robert Oppenheimer was disloyal, Edward Teller answered carefully: "I have always assumed... that he is loyal to the United States." Then he was asked whether Oppenheimer was a security risk, and gave the sentence that ended a friendship and a career: "I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better, and therefore trust more." Oppenheimer's clearance was revoked. Teller was frozen out by the profession he had helped build; the physicist Robert Christy refused to shake his hand.

Budapest, a Streetcar, and Heisenberg

He was born in Budapest on 15 January 1908 to Ilona Deutsch, a pianist, and Miksa Teller, an attorney. He studied chemical engineering at the University of Karlsruhe from 1926 to 1928, physics under Arnold Sommerfeld at Munich, and took his doctorate at Leipzig in 1930 under Werner Heisenberg with a thesis on the hydrogen molecular ion. A streetcar accident in 1928 nearly severed his right foot; he limped for the rest of his life.

The early scientific work is the part of his record that gets forgotten. At George Washington University from 1935 to 1941 he worked alongside George Gamow, organised the annual Washington Conferences on Theoretical Physics from 1935 to 1947, predicted the Jahn–Teller effect in 1937, contributed the T to Brunauer–Emmett–Teller theory, and put his name on the Gamow–Teller selection rules in beta decay. Later he co-authored the 1953 paper that gave the world the Metropolis–Hastings algorithm, still one of the most-used computational methods in science.

Los Alamos and the Super

Invited to Oppenheimer's summer planning seminar in 1942, he arrived at Los Alamos in March 1943 under the cover name "Ed Tilden" and joined the Theoretical Division. He proposed the solid pit design that became the "Christy pit," and eventually headed the Special Group on the Super — the thermonuclear weapon he had been thinking about since before the fission bomb existed. He watched the Trinity test in July 1945 through eye protection and left Los Alamos on 1 February 1946.

He had earlier declined to sign Leo Szilard's petition against dropping the bomb on Japan without warning, having consulted Oppenheimer, who advised leaving such decisions to politicians. In his memoirs he called that an error: "First, Szilard was right... Second, Oppenheimer was right... Third, what we should have done but failed to do was to work out the technical changes required for demonstrating the bomb [very high] over Tokyo."

The Design

He returned to Los Alamos in 1950. In 1951 he and the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam arrived at the breakthrough — radiation implosion, set out in a classified March 1951 paper on "heterocatalytic detonations" — that made a deliverable thermonuclear weapon possible. Ivy Mike, detonated on 1 November 1952, proved it, and Teller became "the father of the hydrogen bomb," a title he wore in public and complicated in print, publishing an article in *Science* in February 1955 titled "The Work of Many People." Ulam maintained that Teller took more credit than he was owed. Hans Bethe assigned the paternity elsewhere: Ulam was the father, Teller the mother, Bethe the midwife.

Livermore, Plowshare, Star Wars

Teller left Los Alamos in 1952 for the newly created Livermore laboratory, which he co-founded with Ernest O. Lawrence and directed from 1958 to 1960. What followed was four decades of restless, sometimes alarming advocacy. Project Plowshare proposed using thermonuclear explosives for civil engineering: Project Chariot (1958–62) would have blasted an artificial harbour at Point Hope, Alaska, and was abandoned on cost and environmental grounds; Project Oilsands would have used nuclear explosions to extract Alberta tar sands, and Canada declined. He proposed setting off nuclear bombs to trigger small hurricanes in place of large ones.

In 1979, after Three Mile Island, he suffered a heart attack while campaigning for nuclear power and signed a *Washington Post* advertisement declaring: "I was the only victim of Three-Mile Island... It was not the reactor. It was Jane Fonda." In the 1980s he became the leading scientific champion of Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, with its orbiting lasers and X-ray weapons; critics accused him and his associate Lowell Wood of overselling it so persistently that a joke defined the "teller" as a unit of unfounded optimism. He advised Israel on nuclear matters for some twenty years and informed the CIA in 1967 that it had built weapons.

Why Edward Is Called a Genius

The case rests on generativity: an unusual rate of producing physical ideas across fields that had no obvious relation to one another. The Jahn–Teller effect belongs to chemistry, BET theory to surface science, Gamow–Teller transitions to nuclear beta decay, the Metropolis algorithm to computation, and his later contributions to Thomas–Fermi and density functional theory to the quantum many-body problem. Any one would make a solid career; he scattered them while chiefly occupied with weapons. Enrico Fermi, who did not hand out compliments, reportedly said Teller was the only monomaniac he knew "who had several manias" — a joke that identifies the actual faculty, which was obsessive depth applied serially to unrelated problems.

The counter-case is that the judgment never matched the invention. Bethe, who worked with him for years, put it precisely: "Nobody will blame Teller because the calculations of 1946 were wrong... But he was blamed at Los Alamos for leading the Laboratory... into an adventurous program." His signature achievement was shared, and Ulam claimed it was over-claimed. His largest late project, SDI, was judged by many colleagues to be oversold to the point of parody. And the hearing testimony cost him the standing that scientific genius is usually measured in: Isidor Rabi's verdict was "It would have been a better world without Teller." Richard Rhodes noted that Lewis Strauss had already decided to revoke the clearance anyway; Barton Bernstein rejected Teller's self-portrait as a covert dissenter. He was a formidable mind whom almost nobody trusted to be right.

Legacy

The honours came anyway: election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1948, the Albert Einstein Award in 1958, *Time*'s Person of the Year in 1960 as one of the "US Scientists," the Enrico Fermi Award in 1962, the Harvey Prize in 1975, the Eringen Medal in 1980, the National Medal of Science in 1982, the Sylvanus Thayer Award in 1986, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2003. So did an Ig Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, for "lifelong efforts to change the meaning of peace as we know it." Asked in 1999 whether he was the model for Dr. Strangelove, he bristled: "My name is not Strangelove... What else can I say?... Say it three times more and I throw you out of this office." He kept working to the end, on planetary defence against comets and on the thorium reactor, and died at Stanford on 9 September 2003, aged ninety-five.