Professorship funded in honor of Edward Teller

Teller

June 17, 1999
Web posted at: 6:41 p.m. EDT (2241 GMT)

By Robin Lloyd
CNN Interactive Senior Writer

(CNN) -- The Fannie and John Hertz Foundation announced this week it will give $1 million to establish an endowed professorship at UC Davis in honor of Edward Teller, the 20th century scientist known as the father of the hydrogen bomb.

The Hertz Foundation board of directors set up the endowment unbeknownst to Teller, 91, who also has been a central figure in the development of quantum mechanics, the building of the atomic bomb and the rise of nuclear power.

The professorship will be held by the chair of the UC Davis Department of Applied Science -- a position first held by Teller, who established the department in 1963. Richard Freeman currently is the department chair.

"Edward Teller's genius has produced monumental contributions to physics," said UC Davis Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef. "This professorship constitutes an honor that will, above all else and in perpetuity, remind us of that genius and those contributions."

Teller was a friend of John Hertz, who came to America from Austria as a virtually penniless boy and who founded such companies as Yellow Cab and Hertz Rent-A-Car before his death in 1961. Teller urged Hertz to orient his foundation to support education in the applied sciences.

Teller retired from the University of California and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1975. He now divides his time between the laboratory, where he is director emeritus, and Stanford University's Hoover Institution, where he is a senior research fellow. His current interests include technological solutions to global warming and to defending the planet from a possible collision with an asteroid or comet.

Teller, a Hungarian trained as a chemical engineer, came of age in Germany. Studying under Werner Heisenberg at the University of Leipzig, Teller received his doctorate in physics in 1930 at the age of 22.

After studying further with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen, Teller contributed to the fields of chemistry and physics. He expected to remain a theoretical researcher until the news in 1939 that German scientists had discovered nuclear fission.

Teller had left Germany shortly after Adolph Hitler came to power and the immigrant became an American citizen and physics professor. Teller's work on the nucleus, or heart of the atom, drew him into the project of building an atomic bomb.

In 1939, Teller joined fellow Hungarian nuclear physicist Leo Szilard and Italian physicist Enrico Fermi to persuade Albert Einstein to sign a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt urging the exploration of the military use of atomic energy. Teller soon became a leader among scientists with the Manhattan Project, which designed and built the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico.

During a CNN Interactive chat in March 1999, Teller described the atmosphere there. "Los Alamos was cut off from the rest of the world," he said. "We had no other place to go for company. We had to be friends; we were friends."

After telling national leaders that the hydrogen bomb was possible, Teller made breakthroughs that led to that even more powerful bomb in 1950.

During the chat, Teller said he stood behind his work on the H-bomb. "I would have been ashamed not to work (on it) when it was work needed to secure world stability," he said. "I was not proud. I did what was obvious."

Teller called his work to inform the government that the H-bomb was possible and should be developed his most significant and most difficult lifetime achievement.

After developing the H-bomb, Teller lobbied for the establishment of a new national laboratory to accelerate nuclear weapons development. Teller and Ernest Lawrence, one of Teller's Manhattan Project colleagues, chose an abandoned naval air station in Livermore for the site of what would become the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

In the 1980s, Teller regained his post-World War II public prominence when he became a proponent of the Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars defense, aimed at using lasers in orbit or guided satellites to destroy attacking missiles.

Teller continues to advocate the project now that Congress again is considering it.

Teller said he was surprised to be blamed for the arms race by some, including the late Carl Sagan. "Had we not pursued the hydrogen bomb, there is a very real threat that we would now all be speaking Russian," Teller said. "I have no regrets."

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