Edward Teller's father once travelled to Karlsruhe to question his switch to physics
Edward Teller, remembered as the father of the hydrogen bomb, nearly became a chemical engineer. Lectures by visiting professor Herman Mark convinced him that new physics was transforming chemistry, and his worried father travelled to speak with his teachers before giving permission. The switch led to the Manhattan Project and Livermore.
Ede Teller was born in Budapest on 15 January 1908, then part of Austria-Hungary, to a Jewish family: his mother Ilona was a pianist and his father Miksa an attorney. He was slow to start talking but loved numbers, working out huge sums in his head for fun. An agnostic, he later recalled that his family observed only the Day of Atonement. In 1926 he left for Germany, driven partly by the numerus clausus quota rule of Miklós Horthy's government, and the upheavals of his youth left him hostile to both Communism and Fascism.
At Karlsruhe he studied mathematics and chemistry between 1926 and 1928, graduating in chemical engineering, a safe route to a well-paid industrial job. Herman Mark, a polymer chemist, introduced him to the quantum breakthroughs of Louis de Broglie and others. His father feared physics offered no clear career, yet after talking with the professors he agreed.
Teller moved to the United States in the 1930s, one of the Hungarian émigré scientists nicknamed the Martians. Gamow-Teller transitions extended Enrico Fermi's beta decay theory, while the Jahn-Teller effect and BET theory remain standard in physics and chemistry. A 1953 paper he co-wrote with Nicholas Metropolis, the Rosenbluths and Augusta Teller launched Monte Carlo methods in statistical mechanics and later Bayesian statistics.
An early Manhattan Project member, he pressed hard for fusion weapons, which arrived only after World War II. He backed the George shot of Operation Greenhouse, the first thermonuclear burn, co-founded Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and served as its director or associate director. Later he championed Project Chariot, a scheme to blast an artificial harbour in Alaska with a thermonuclear device, and Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. He won the Enrico Fermi Award and died on 9 September 2003, aged 95.
Source: Edward Teller
