September 10, 2003
WHAT'S SO STRANGE ABOUT LOVING FREEDOM?:
Edward Teller Is Dead at 95; Fierce Architect of H-Bomb: Edward Teller, who was present at the creation of the first nuclear weapons and who grew even more famous for defending them, died yesterday at his home on the Stanford University campus in Palo Alto, Calif., according to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which Dr. Teller once headed. He was 95. (WALTER SULLIVAN, September 10, 2003, NY Times)
While many colleagues did not share Dr. Teller's political views, to some scientists his was a voice of realism crying out in a wilderness of liberal navetÈ. But Dr. Teller's critics were as impassioned as his supporters. During the Vietnam War, Dr. Teller was the target of unrelenting vilification from antiwar activists. He was seen as the model for Dr. Strangelove, the motion picture character with an artifical arm who "loved the bomb" and spoke with a Central European accent.Dr. Teller's English, though fluent and eloquent, revealed his Hungarian roots, and he had an artificial replacement for the foot he lost in 1928 as a student when he jumped from a moving Munich streetcar.
Edward Teller was born in Budapest on Jan. 15, 1908, the son of Max Teller, a lawyer, and Ilona Deutsch Teller, an accomplished pianist.
As an infant Dr. Teller, like Einstein, was slow to begin speaking, but as he developed he displayed amazing mathematical ability. When he told his father that he wanted to study mathematics, his father discouraged him, saying that he would not be able to make a living as a mathematician. In a compromise, young Teller agreed to study chemistry, but he later said that he "cheated" by studying mathematics too.
When he was about 20, a new subject captured his imagination. He began to hear of advances in atomic theory and "a whole new world" opened up to him, he later said in an interview. [...]
The hearings on Dr. Oppenheimer were held in 1954 after J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, received a long letter from William Liscum Borden, a member of Senator McMahon's staff, explaining why he believed Dr. Oppenheimer was an agent of the Soviet Union.
The accusation led President Eisenhower to order the Atomic Energy Commission to review whether Dr. Oppenheimer's security clearance should be revoked. Hearings were held by the commission's Personnel Security Board, which asked Dr. Teller to appear.
Asked if he considered Dr. Oppenheimer disloyal to the United States, Dr. Teller said no. He was then asked whether he regarded him as a security risk. He replied that he often found Dr. Oppenheimer's actions "hard to understand."
"I thoroughly disagreed with him in numerous issues and his actions frankly appeared to me confused and complicated," Dr. Teller told the panel.
A large part of the scientific community, dismayed at the witch-hunting of the McCarthy era, aware of long-standing friction between Dr. Teller and Dr. Oppenheimer, and loyal to the leader of the original atomic bomb project, turned its back on Dr. Teller. "By old friends we were practically ostracized," he reported later. His wife "was very badly hurt" and became ill. [...]
On July 23, President Bush presented Dr. Teller with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country's highest civilian award.
Nothing speaks worse of the anti-anti-communists than that they made heroes of communist agents and dupes like Alger Hiss and Robert Oppenheimer while vilifying better men and patriots like Whittaker Chambers (who was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan) and Edward Teller. Posted by Orrin Judd at September 10, 2003 9:41 AM
The left has always been unfomfortable with
patriotic immigrants. It refutes there rhetoric
that America is a less civilized place that must
be fled from rather than a beacon that draws
the best and the brightest.
Actually, plenty of things about the anti-anti-communists speak badly of them -- so many that I'm not sure it's easy to establish a hierarchy.
Posted by: Chris at September 10, 2003 12:40 PMEven anti, anti-communists had real enemies who had no love for liberty.
But we've been over that before. In regard to Teller, I'd point out that modern physics developed in England, France, the United States and, overwhelmingly, in one neighborhood of Budapest.
If you want a good model for education, you couldn't do better than copy them.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at September 10, 2003 5:21 PMNot really. Eotvos, who as far as I can tell was really the center of it all, was a von, so not a Jew. Jungk has a little about it in "Brighter Than a Thousand Suns."
Posted by: Harry Eagar at September 10, 2003 10:04 PMWhat were Einstein, Oppenheimer, Teller, Feynman, Szilard, etc.?
Posted by: oj at September 10, 2003 10:09 PMAn Editor of the Economist wrote a biography of John von Neuman (also jewish), who invented game theory and the mathmatical structure of the digital computer among other things. The biographer said the same thing that Harry Eagar said.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at September 10, 2003 10:54 PM"What were Einstein, Oppenheimer, Teller, Feynman, Szilard, etc.?"
Nice Irish names, all of them. ;-)
I was referring specifically to the Hungarian contingent.
No Jews were involved in the very earliest advances in particle physics, which came out of England, with one prominent New Zealander, and America.
By the 1930s, physics theory had moved the Central Europe. Oppenheimer, for example, got his advanced training in Germany, and not from German Jews, either.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at September 11, 2003 2:33 PMWas Rutherford the New Zealander? As I recall, he dismissed the weapons potential of splitting the atom?
Posted by: oj at September 11, 2003 3:15 PMOrrin suggests I comment here but I'm not sure what the issue is.
Eotvos was hardly at the center of it all, at least in modern recountings. He died in 1919, before the really revolutionary advances in modern physics -- quantum mechanics.
The greatest figures in early 20th century physics, Einstein and Bohr, were German-Swiss and Danish -- not among the nations Harry lists. The center of modern physics was the U.S. after World War II, but before Hitler much of the best work was done in central Europe.
Posted by: pj at September 11, 2003 3:30 PMI guess I never made my original point clear enough. It was a digression.
I merely wanted to note that an astonishingly high percentage of the big noises in modern physics came from one neighborhood of Budapest, a city not otherwise looked to for leadership. Eotvos did not work to any extent in particle physics, but he was the heart of the remarkable output of talented theorists who did end up working in particle physics.
Rutherford, Fermi, a Japanese physicist whose name escapes me now were isolates. Perhaps the Budapest group was a sport, too, but the evidence indicates that it was something deliberate.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at September 11, 2003 7:15 PMI don't want to be long-winded, but you guys have shown a lot of interest in education.
The Budapest example seems worth studying.
As for Jews/gentiles, I interpret the mixture in the realms of theoretical (and to a lesser extent, experimental) physics to the characteristics of the central European literate class.
Jews were probably somewhat overrepresented there, presumably a cultural artifact of their history of respect for abstract argument. But as I see it, the leading physicists were the cream of a cosmopolitan culture that was, for Europeans, indifferent to religion.
In the US, the leading physicists were concentrated in Cambridge, Chicago and California, with Cleveland a somewhat improbable outlier.
I cannot think of any family that contributed more than the Comptons. I know nothing of their background but assume they were not Jews.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at September 11, 2003 7:20 PMYes, we asumed your reluctance to concede a key role to Jews stemmed from a fear of acknowledging their religion.
Posted by: oj at September 11, 2003 7:25 PMI'm not denying a key role to Jews. I do not believe there is any such thing as Jewish physics, though.
As far as I know, there has never been a leading modern physicist who held conventional views about religion.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at September 12, 2003 2:49 PM