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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."
In the salad days of nuclear-weapons testing, the United States detonated 331atomic, hydrogen, and thermonuclear bombs. Many of those explosions appear in Trinity and Beyond, which utilizes a lot of declassified footage, most of it in color. Standouts include the United States' South Pacific detonation of an atom bomb 90 feet below the water to study the effects on a fleet of ships. Surprise, surprise, they sink! If that wasn't enough, the navy also loaded the decks with sheep to study the effects of the blast on life forms. Surprise, surprise, they die! Glowing leg of lamb anyone? This film will alternately amuse and horrify you at the rampant irresponsibility of the Soviets and Americans in their quest for nuclear domination. The Russians have the honor of having detonated the largest nuclear bomb ever at a whopping 58 megatons. The Hiroshima bomb was barely a kiloton. Of course, after the U.S.and Russia ceased their activities, the Chinese decided to get in on the act. But that's a different story for a different documentary.
I have no objections to a healthy debate about nuclear weapons, but you have to think that their main task is wholesale destruction.
Walter Sullivan, a science writer and editor for The New York Times, died in 1996.
Spooky.
Rest in peace, o ye father of the cold war. And may lessons be learned from your mistakes, your regrets, and your insights.
Kip Hawley is an idiot.
A few years ago, he and colleagues submitted a paper to Nature that suggested dispersing sulfur dioxide or other submicron particles in the stratosphere to block sunlight and thus halt global warming.
Easing the effects of one kind of pollutant by adding a whole bunch of other pollutants to the atmosphere. Goodbye, global warming; hello, acid rain! Between that, and the whole hydrogen bomb thing, I'm guessing he wasn't up for Greenpeace's Man of the Year award.
Edward Teller did more to bring this world to the brink of destruction than any other human that has ever lived.
His ego drove him to push the hydrogen bomb on the world, and his ego prevented him from both admitting his mistake and from doing his best (like many of the other scientists who aided him) to make amends.
For those of who you insist the hydrogen bomb is necessary for national security, you're both ignorant and foolish. The hydrogen bomb has basically no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
A non-hydrogen based atomic bomb has more than enough bang to destroy our enemies. The ONLY use for a hydrogen bomb is planetary destruction.
I, for one, will not miss Teller in the least. He represents the worst of humanity. He was willing to put his ego ahead of, quite literally, ALL else.
Probably just a coincidence, maybe...
I posted this a few years ago for a related story, but it seems worth repeating now:
;)
So, I met him in an pseudo-interview with about 6 other students. I asked him if it ever bothered him to be the "Father of the H-Bomb" since his "baby" could be used for such evil and/or immoral purposes.
I thought he was going to jump out of his chair at me.
He got very upset and angrily announced that a scientist's only responsibility is to science. The possible uses of a discovery should not even be considered by the researchers -- that is someone elses business. And because of this, he did not feel even the slightest bit of remorse for his work on the bomb.
And then he upbraided _me_ (since I was on my way to grad school to become a scientist at the time) for thinking that a scientist _should_ worry about the moral implications of his/her work.
Needless to say, I didn't ask any more questions.
Yes indeed. Well put.
If it's not one thing it's your mother.
Nope, they won't even need an SUV. They'll just build it in place. It makes the whole thing much easier and cheaper that way since you can make a big, heavy, crude sucker out of whatever you can turn to the task.
.gasp, use the internet.
You just rent that abandoned warehouse on the edge of town. Every big town has many to choose from.
No need to be a kamikaze either since you don't need to worry about getting close enough to the target like you do with a conventional bomb.
Either set a timer a week or so down the road, set it off with a radio,, or maybe a phone call, or. .
KFG
Great pic of the sausage can be found here:
The Sausage
It doesn't look too impressive until you see the guy sitting in front of it, which puts it into perspective. This was the United State's first thermonuclear device. Yield: 10.4 megatons. Made a big boom. =)
He was also a cretin who tried to destroy the carreers of more talented people who stood in his way (Oppenheimer cough) he used other physicist under fear of alienation, rather than by sheer briliance and respect.
His contributions to the field of physics are nil, unlike Oppenheimer et al.
He also brought the most destructive power in the universe and allowed humans to not only destruct themselves but the whole planet. That is just too rotten... thank you Mr. Teller!
make a big, heavy, crude sucker out of whatever you can turn to the task.
The word "crude" has no place around atomic weapons. You've got to line up the atoms exactly, or almost nothing happens.
However, it would be quite reasonable to ship a bomb as little parts, each 40kg or less, which can be assembled near the target site. I'd personally recommend concealing them inside the air-gaps within wide-screen TVs being shipped from China, but there are lots of ways to hide these things.
gasp, use the internet.
I've got a screenplay to sell you. An attractive teenage hacker stumbles onto a terrorist plot to nuke Washington, but he wards it off with a quick DDoS worm. Now he's got to find the bomb and unplug it while dodging the FBI and HLS agents hot on his trail!
No, Teller wasnt't the mad one, Curtis LeMay was the crazy one.
He scared the Congress and President so much as both the head of SAC and as a loon that they instituted the Civilian Control of Nuclear Weapons so that he couldn't use them as much as he wanted to.
Strange. Most Russians I have met say that living in Communist Russian was hell. But quite a lot better than living in the Capitalist Russia they have now.
Brief history lesson, Germans almost develop ABomb, Americans using German know how do finish it. Americans only people to actually use a nuclear device in anger. Soviets steal secrets of ABomb from the Americans.
MAD isn't such a bad idea, unfortunately it relies on the premise that both sides are unwilling to risk it all in a conflict. It also relies on the fact that both sides have the same capabilities. If one side develops a technology that would mean they wont get wiped out in a world war then the balance has been thrown out of whack, and that is where things get dangerous.
Then you get the rogue states like Israel and North Korea, those who possess nuclear weapons yet refuse to sign onto the international treaties that form the basis of the MAD doctirine.
Teller didn't "balance the scales", if you want to get technical, the Soviets balanced the scales by stealing the Abomb.
A lot of left-wing scientists hated Teller for his ambiguous testimony about Oppenheimer, but Oppenheimer really was a security risk.
Holy crap, did you admire them from a hole in the ground? Oppenheimer was much more of a true patriot than Teller; in the long run the efforts of Teller will continue to be completely negative for America and the world. There is no scientific angle, he didn't contribute much if anything. And worst of all he drove a slander against Oppenheimer, that wasn't scientific or good in any way, it was just emotional knee-jerk reaction based on scars left from the Nazis rolling over home Hungary.
It's sad that he died but the world needs fewer Tellers.
Apparently nobody studies history anymore, but Mr. Teller should be recognized as a national hero of science.
.25 million Nipponese saved the lives of at least 15 million. If you can coherently argue otherwise, I agree to disagree, but would encourage an indepth study of Japan circa 1920-45 rather than trade meaningless barbs. The study of radiation effects is impossible to understand humanely, but asking a million Marines to kill millions is hardly an adequate answer.
Oppenheimer had been closely associated with communists from his earliest relationships, had latter vigorously attempted to stop H bomb development, and the secrets of the atomic bomb were stolen from under his management. To fault Teller for bearing true witness is lunacy, nearly as crazy as it was to fault Robert for his friendships and point of view, (which he had forthrightly admitted prior to becoming admin of Los Alamos).
Moreover, Teller had a legitimate reason to fear and despise Stalin, along with any group to which he was associated, having witnessed the terror of the Red army spilling familial blood in the streets of Hungary. He had first hand knowledge of the depths of its depravity, and was prescient in his understanding that only inexplicable horror would sate the whims of communist dictators.
That he should love this country enough to devote the greater part of his life and mental energies to protecting US dominance and expanding our sphere of influence to cover the globe demonstrates an uncanny foresight coupled with what must have been a deeply held love for the whole of humanity. Admittedly he hid it well with gruff mannerisms, but any other conclusions are based on illogical, often hysterical premises.
Consider the historical context: Both the Germans AND Japanese were developing nuclear weapons. Stalin killed 25 million Russians, Poles, Jews, etc. Germans killed untold millions after working them to death, and experimented on living 'subjects'. The Japanese were guilty of the Bataan death march, and countless atrocities not limited even to hacking off prisoners penises and sewing them to their lips while still alive, and easily raping and killing millions of innocent civilians. You have to be strictly ignorant of the 20th century not to realize that our obtaining first mastery of atomic structure is the only thing that stopped terrorism on a continental scale. If any of these parties had gained an unanswerable first strike nuclear capability, the untold misery of billions would have hung in the balance.
Teller, Szilard, Oppenheimer, Rabi, Bohr, Rutherford, Einstein, and the other scientists involved in atom & H bomb development are owed a HUGE debt of gratitude by the world, by civilization itself.
The world is a shade darker with the loss of Edward's brilliance.
Kommando Chris
PS: It's sad to realize the unknowing sacrifice of
Hirohito was powerless and mute without the shock and terror delivered to the populous, and if the destruction of Tokyo by bombardment had not produced the desired surrender (civilians were ordered to stay in their homes and try to put out the fires until dead), how many more millions should we have blown up to bring the war to an end?
Simply put, it was the most horrible and humane way to bring a merciful end to the insanity of that war.
PSS: Pacifists (Einstein, Szilard & Fermi(?)) hatched the idea of atomic bombs, the liberal Democrats (FDR) in government secretly commited to and funded these 'horrible' and 'inhumane' weapons, a 'communist' (Oppie) developed them, and another Democrat (Truman) dropped them. Please explain to me why I'm more intelligent, compassionate and humane as a pacifist Democratic voter again? Oh yeah, our party blew up 250,000 innocent civilians. And we freed the slaves, er... wait a minute... and we directly increased taxes to consumers by increasing taxes on the evil corporations, who only add that cost directly to their goods and services...ummmm, shit. Harakiri anyone?
The site of that test is now a mecca for diving enthusiasts, but the person who owns the dive rights only opens the waters for very limited usage. Hence divers dream about being able to dive in the waters which now has an immensely rich biodiversity. But they know they are unlikely to ever get there. FWIW's the test was an astonishing attempt to try and see what effect the bomb would have on a real fleet. There is at least one aircraft carrier down there.
I heard NPR cover this story yesterday and they had stated that he was very careful about what he said, and did not want to be taken out of context; so much so, that he would time his response to questions with a stopwatch!
[[ the only 15 letter word that is spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable: it may soon be, however. ]]
being into science could also make you very unpopular.
Yes, I became a scientist despite being presented with the image of Simon Barsinister, villian of Underdog, at an early age.
Edward Teller was an extraordinary individual, both quirky and brilliant. And he kind of looked a bit like Simon Barsinister, too.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the laboratory that Teller and E. O. Lawrence founded back in the 50s. Teller still came into the lab every few days or so up the point of his death. Periodically, he would give Q/A sessions with summer students and other interested parties.
On July 24 of this year, I attended one of these. I can write a lot about what he had to say, but what has come to the fore of my mind since the news of his death was one question in particular. Someone asked him what he most wanted to be remembered for. He responded that his discovery of the "Jahn-Teller effect" was the work that he was most proud of. It involes crystal symmetry arising from interactions between elecrons and nuclei, and turned out to be very important for material science.
This was work that he did to help unravel certain energy configurations of the benzene molecule. I'm not a chemist, so I only have the vaguest notion of what the Jahn-Teller effect entails. But it involves calculating the electron distribution of a molecule, coupled with its vibrational energy. If I am understanding it correctly, Jahn and Teller first demonstrated that the two energy states can be coupled, allowing for a lower, most stable energy state than if each were considered separately. It's still studied to this day.
Teller got very animated while he was talking about his work on this. I find it a shame that none of the writeups and obituaries I've read have mentioned this work. This is my small contribution.