Teller, Edward physicist

During World War II, the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico conducted a highly secret and successful operation to build the world s first atomic bomb. The bomb ended the war, and politicians as well as scientists began to appreciate the benefits of establishing scientific laboratories and conducting research. The national laboratory at Los Alamos continued its work on atomic physics and other projects after the war, and in the early 1950s, the physicists Ernest Lawrence (1901-58) at the University of California, Berkeley, and Edward Teller (1908-2003), then at Los Alamos, urged the establishment of another laboratory. Under the supervision of the University of California, a new national laboratory was set up in Livermore, California, in 1952, with Herbert York (1921-2009), a former student of Lawrence, as its first director. 

Edward Teller, one of the brilliant physicists who fied Hungary before the war and a key member of the Los Alamos team, had no doubts about the right course of action. He urged the US government to pursue the idea he had discussed with Fermi in 1942 a superbomb that liberated nuclear energy not by fission but by fusion. The fusion bomb creates, for a blinding instant, an artificial sun. 

But through it all he remained, on the surface, a joyful warrior for peace. Pauling made speech after speech before peace groups. On television he debated Edward Teller, the anticommunist physicist known as the father of the H-bomb, and Atomic Energy Commission scientific advisor Willard Libby. He wrote an antibomb book titled No More War and traveled the world in support of other prominent antibomb leaders, such as the philosopher Bertrand Russell in England... 

These first nuclear weapons were atomic bombs or A-bombs. They depended on the energy produced by nuclear fission for their destructive power. However, scientists like U.S. physicist Edward Teller (1908-) knew even before the first atomic bomb exploded that the fission weapons... 

Hungarian theorist Edward Teller (left) helped make the plutonium bomb work Navy physicist Norris Bradbury directed its test assembly at Trinity. Teller guided H-bomb theoretical studies at Los Alamos. 

The most common example of the resonance theory is the description of the benzene structure. The experimentally precisely determined and accurately known carbon-carbon bond length is consistent with the model as average of the resonance structures. When Pauling s resonance description of the benzene structure was criticized, the physicist Edward Teller and his colleagues provided spectroscopic evidence to support it [40]. The Nobel laureate physicist Philip Anderson was oblivious of Teller s and his co-workers paper (Private communication from Philip Anderson to the author by e-mail in 2009), and 68 years after Teller s contribution, in 2008, Anderson communicated another supportive paper for Pauling s model [41]. 

While each of the four processes fought to demonstrate its workability during summer and fall 1942 equally important theoretical studies were being conducted that greatly influenced the decisions made in November. Robert Oppenheimer headed the work of a group of theoretic physicists he called the luminaries, wWch included Felix Bloch, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, and Robert Serber, while John H. Manley assisted him by coordinating nationwide fission research and instrument and measurement studies from the Metallurgical... 

Soon a fourth scientist was invited into the discussion—the Hungarian-born physicist Edward Teller, whose work had also focused on fission. Later the four scientists met with Alexander Sachs, a Russian-born economist who was a friend of President Roosevelt. They decided that Einstein would draft a letter to Roosevelt alerting the president of the danger, and Sachs would deliver it. 

Michael Polanyi was born as the fifth child into a liberal Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary. His father Mihaly Pollacsek was a railway engineer and entrepreneur his mother Cecile (nee Wohl) was the daughter of a liberal Jewish educator from Vilna and organizer of a popular literary saion. In 1908 he graduated from the Minta Gymnasium in Budapest, also the alma mater of famous physicists Theodore von Kar-man and Edward Teller. f Polanyi first studied... 

TELLER-ULAM CONCEPT. On 13 January 1950, President Harry S. Traman atmounced that he was directing the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to develop a thermonuclear weapon. At the time, U.S. nuclear weapon designers had failed to develop a successful concept for such a device. In late 1950 and early 1951, physicists Stanislaw Ulam and Edward Teller advanced a concept for such a... 

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