tters of intellectual combat.”
Laboratory Director Emeritus Bruce Tarter recalls of Teller, “When one raised a question to him, he could give a 5- to 10-minute comprehensive, erudite answer that was astounding. He thought about physics all the time. Two of his defining drives in life were an insatiable intellectual curiosity and a powerful desire to understand the universe.”
Livermore physicist Mort Weiss recalls, “Teller had a wide range of interests and that made him a lot of fun. He was very open to new ideas. There was nothing small about him.” Livermore physicist Berni Alder adds, “Teller was interested in so many things. He talked to everyone. When he smelled something interesting, he got involved. He always questioned people about their current work. He liked imaginative, creative, quick-thinking people. Teller didn’t tolerate fools.”
Teller once said, “Knowledge may be dangerous. Ignorance is incomparably more dangerous.” Because he was always intensely curious in matters of science, Teller enjoyed discussing the latest scientific advances, especially in physics. “He would be interested in the fundamental aspects of a problem,” says Wood. “If he could not find the bedrock in a problem, it was just a descriptive exercise, telling what it is, not why it is. By looking into the heart of a problem, he could tell someone what fundamental things were possible.”
Teller had extremely high standards for what it meant to understand a topic, for example, particle physics. Snyderman explains, “He wrote papers with fellow giants of physics such as Enrico Fermi, Lev Landau, Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger, and George Gamow that went straight to the heart of a problem.” These renowned papers were more complete than most current published papers.
Wood recalls attending a presentation by Teller in 1959 while an undergraduate at the University of California (UC) at Los Angeles. Teller, who was the director of Livermore at the time, gave a technical seminar on the gravitational constant. His talk argued against the hypothesis that the gravitational constant had varied significantly since the birth of the universe—a hypothesis of Paul Dirac, one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century. In his lecture, Teller stated that if such variations had existed, the Sun would have been so luminous that the oceans would have likely boiled over during past epochs. However, fossil evidence shows life thrived. “His argument combined geology, astrophysics, biology, and paleontology,” says Wood. “It was a staggering tour de force. He prepared his talk in his spare time, while he was leading the charge toward modern thermonuclear weapons. I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this guy really knows physics.’ I never forgot that seminar.”
Teller’s rare combination of deep knowledge and boundless imagination was evident even in his last years. (See the box below.) Less than two weeks before he died, Teller asked to see new data supporting an accelerating expansion of the universe. Three days before his death, Teller, Wood, and Nuckolls held a long discussion about advanced energy systems for the future.
Impressive Record of Physics
During the first phase, which immediately followed the discovery of quantum mechanics, Teller made contributions to a host of physics disciplines, including statistical mechanics, quantum theory, molecular physics, condensed-matter physics, surface physics, magnetism, nuclear physics, and astrophysics. (See the box below.) These contributions remain fundamental parts of current scientific knowledge and understanding.
Teller’s early work on molecular physics provided insights to the dynamics of polyatomic molecules, thus deeply influencing subsequent development in the area of physical chemistry. Perhaps the most important part of this work was the discovery of the Jahn–Teller effect describing the distortion of nominally symmetric molecules. The Jahn–Teller effect is ubiquitous in chemical and solid-state physics.
Teller also proposed what became the basic adsorption model in surface physics, the Brunauer–Emmett–Teller equation