Edward Teller Passes Away At 95

Lord Prox writes "Edward Teller, one of the 20th Century's greats in physics, died Tuesday afternoon at his home in Stanford. He was 95." Newsforge.com also has one of the final interviews with Teller, who was "a principal architect of the hydrogen bomb, [and] passionate advocate of nuclear power and antimissile defense."

Comments

Check out "The Making of the Atomic Bomb"

[Anonymous Coward]

By Richard Rhoads.

It's a fantastic book about the creation of the Atomic Bomb -- from when scientists first realized the possibility, through the manhatten project. It's set against the backdrop of political events of the first half of the century and provides a fascinating account of the entire experience, including the actions of Edward Teller.

I'd highly recommend it.

Re:obituary writer dead too

[ChrisHanel]

Yeah, papers like the New York Times tend to stockpile Obituaries for people they know are going to kick the bucket soon. Obviously, Teller hung around a lot longer than they expected.

IIRC, there was a website slipup where obituaries for people who weren't dead yet suddenly appeared in a code glitch. I think Ronald Reagan was one of them... pretty amusing how poignant they read.

Re:Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie

[afidel]

The amazing thing wasn't that some ships sank, it was that of the 100+ ships in the bay that ONLY 13 sank in TWO detonation! (the first one ABLE was above ground and sunk 5 ships, the second underwater test BAKER sunk 8). Btw the scrap ships used for the test would have qualified as the world's 8th largest navy if they had been owned by another country and the support staff occupied another 115 vessels.

Re:Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie

[Anonymous Coward]

Hiroshima was in around 15 kilotons, not "barely a kiloton".

No mention of Ulam?

[piotru]

For good or bad, Teller wasn't the only father of the hydrogen bomb.
From:
http://www.phy.bg.ac.yu/web_projects /giants/teller .html

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Teller and his colleagues at Los Alamos made little actual progress in designing a workable thermonuclear device until early in 1951, when the physicist Stanislaw M. Ulam proposed to use the mechanical shock of an atomic bomb to compress a second fissile core and make it explode; the resulting high density would make the burning of the second core's thermonuclear fuel much more efficient. Teller in response suggested that radiation, rather than mechanical shock, from the atomic bomb's explosion be used to compress and ignite the thermonuclear second core. Together these new ideas provided a firm basis for a fusion weapon, and a device using the Teller-Ulam configuration, as it is now known, was successfully tested at Enewetak atoll in the Pacific on Nov. 1, 1952; it yielded an explosion equivalent to 10 million tons (10 megatons) of TNT.

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Re:It should also be said..

[hoofie]

Extract from Times Obituary :

"He was later to say that, unlike Oppenheimer, he was opposed to the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, and would have preferred a demonstration of the new weapon's power to Japanese scientists. Nevertheless, in his memoirs, published in 2001, Teller admitted, while continuing to believe that Oppenheimer's opposition to the H-bomb was wrong, that the hearings had been a mistake, and that he himself had been unwise to testify."

Re:Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie

[atomicarchive]

The ABLE bomb was dropped off target, a tail fin on the bomb failed. That is why so few ships were sunk. Although the BAKER test did sink more ships, the water plume that was created was very radioactive and if the ships had been manned, there would have been serious radiation issues for the crew. For more information : Operation Crossroads or buy the Atomic Archive CD-ROM