Edward Teller
An early life marked by political instability
Edward Teller was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1908 into a Jewish family. His early ages were tainted with a lot of socio-political instability, but he was lucky enough to live in a loving, protecting and prosperous family. As a young boy, he lived through the difficult years of World War I. He also experienced the dismemberment of the Austria-Hungary (the Austro-Hungarian empire) which collapsed as a result of its defeat in World War I. After the war, he also witnessed the short-lived socialist regime of Bela Kun together with the devastating currency inflation that followed and affected Hungary a great deal at the time. Amidst all these, he was anyways a joyful and friendly boy. Dyson, in his book about Teller would later confirm that “His memoirs are full of stories about his friends and the tragic fates that many of them encountered” [1]. Seeing his Jewish friends being killed, he has come to realize to a great degree that human life is very fragile and frail. He escaped the fate of the killings perpetrated on Jewish people by first moving from Hungary to Germany in 1926, from Germany to Denmark in 1933, from Denmark to England in 1934, and from England to America in 1935.
Research in quantum and nuclear physics
While a student in Germany, he joined a group of young people working at Leipzig and led by the 28 years old Heisenberg. The latter had just come up his leading-edge quantum mechanics paradigm in 1925. Quantum mechanics provided Teller with a thorough understanding of the working mechanism of atoms and how to better explain them. He used to his advantage of the promise of quantum mechanics to explain all that atoms do and explain their behavior. As a chemist in the group, Teller also decided to use chemistry to explain quantum mechanics. In 1930, Teller wrote a Ph.D. Thesis on the hydrogen molecule ion, the simplest of all molecules and made the subsequent years, significant contributions to molecular chemistry by applying quantum mechanics to it.
In 1933, when Hitler came to power, he moved to Copenhagen, Denmark where he met George Gamow, a young Russian who had been the first to apply quantum mechanics to nuclear physics. When Gamow moved to George Washington University in Washington, D.C., Teller decided to move to London. In 1935, he joined Gamow, at Gamow’s invitation, at George Washington University. Together, they came up with the Gamow-Teller theory, a nuclear physics theory that became twenty years later the basis for unified theory of weak interactions.
“In June 1939 Teller moved from Washington to Columbia University to help Fermi and Szilard with their project to build the first nuclear reactor” [1] While in New York and a few weeks before the outbreak of world war II, he received the visit of Heisenberg and tried to convince him to stay in America. Heisenberg politely declined the invitation but they will remain lifelong friends. A few days later, Szilard wrote a letter to President Roosevelt to inform him of the discovery of fission and the possibility of nuclear bombs. He got the letter signed by Einstein with the help of Teller as a driver since Szilard could not drive. “As a result, an official advisory committee on Uranium was established, and the bureaucratic machinery that later grew into the Manhattan Project slowly began to grind” [1].
The Manhattan Project and the Hydrogen Bomb
Teller worked two years (March 1943 – February 1946) at Los Alamos National Laboratory on the Manhattan Project which was an Allied effort to develop the first nuclear weapons. Even though Teller believed in the development of a nuclear weapon, he was reluctant to the idea of a weapon based on nuclear fission. Before the project began, he was invited to participate at Robert Oppenheimer’s summer planning seminar at the University of California, Berkeley to discuss the underlying scientific ideas of the Manhattan Project. “At the Berkeley session, Teller diverted discussion from the fission weapon to the possibility of a fusion weapon—what he called the Super, an early concept of what was later to be known as a hydrogen bomb” [3].
At Los Alamos, he first worked in the Theoretical Division that was led by Hans Bethe. But probably because of his interest in the Super and his repulsion for tedious calculations, he refused to do a massive calculation of the physics and hydrodynamics of an imploding bomb. He ran into some trouble with Hans because of that and was later moved out of the Theoretical Division by Oppenheimer whom he pretty much enjoyed working with. He was put in charge of a special group responsible of investigating his idea of the hydrogen bomb. Teller’s Super group became part of his friend Fermi’s F Division. “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 Goeppert-Mayer” [3]
After the war, in 1950, Teller would return to Los Alamos to work on the H-bomb project. With his Polish mathematician friend Stanislaw Ulam, Teller made a breakthrough invention that made possible the design of an H-bomb that was thought to be impracticable by some renowned physicists of his time. They came up with the Teller-Ulam design that is not, up to date, entirely accessible in the public domain. After the detonation of the first thermonuclear weapon to utilize the Teller–Ulam configuration, on November 1, 1952 in Ivy Mike, Teller became known to the media as the “father of the hydrogen bomb”
References
[1] F. J. Dyson, Edward Teller 1908-2003: A Biographical Memoir by Freeman J. Dyson, Washington: National Academy of Sciences, 2007.
[2] I. Hargittai, Judging Edward Teller: A closer look at one of the most influential scientists of the twentieth century, New York: Prometheus Books, 2010.
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Teller [Accessed: Jan. 17, 2018]
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Written by Bossou