“They [Israel] have it, and they were clever enough to trust their research and not to test, they know that to test would get them into trouble.”
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Edward Teller
Edward Teller was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist and chemical engineer who is known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb" and one of the creators of the Teller–Ulam design inspired by Stanisław Ulam.
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science · Hungarian-American physicist (1908–2003) · nuclear physicist · non-fiction writer · university teacher · theoretical physicist · inventor · physicist · also Edward Teller, Teller
Born 15 January 1908 · Died 9 September 2003 · Q6733
70 published statements · 0 followers
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2026· 3 entries
Public attention spiked: 7,458 Wikipedia readers in one day, 5.2× the usual 1,436, with 0 article edits.
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Public attention spiked: 6,185 Wikipedia readers in one day, 4.3× the usual 1,436, with 0 article edits.
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2012· 1 entry
Awarded honorary citizen of Budapest (2012).
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2007· 1 entry
About Edward Teller's life and contributions to science, to commemorate the 2008 centennial of his birth
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2003· 14 entries
Died 2003-09-09.
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Won Presidential Medal of Freedom presented by George W. Bush (2003).
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“When you come to the end of all the light you know, and it's time to step into the darkness of the unknown, faith is knowing that one of two things shall happen: either you will be given something solid to stand on or you will be taught to fly.”
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“There's no system foolproof enough to defeat a sufficiently great fool.”
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“My name is not Strangelove. I don't know about Strangelove. I'm not interested in Strangelove. What else can I say?... Look. Say it three times more, and I throw you out of this office.”
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“When you fight for a desperate cause and have good reasons to fight, you usually win.”
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“There is no case where ignorance should be preferred to knowledge — especially if the knowledge is terrible.”
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“If we could have ended the war by showing the power of science without killing a single person, all of us would now be happier, more reasonable and much more safe.”
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“Secrecy in science does not work. Withholding information does more damage to us than to our competitors.”
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“I believe that no endeavor that is worthwhile is simple in prospect; if it is right, it will be simple in retrospect.”
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“I believe in excellence. It is a basic need of every human soul. All of us can be excellent, because, fortunately, we are exceedingly diverse in our ambitions and talents.”
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“I believe in evil. It is the property of all those who are certain of truth. Despair and fanaticism are only differing manifestations of evil.”
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“I believe in good. It is an ephemeral and elusive quality. It is the center of my beliefs, but it cannot be strengthened by talking about it.”
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“I hate doubt, yet I am certain that doubt is the only way to approach anything worth believing in.”
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2002· 1 entry
Teller contended that Oppenheimer was "not destroyed" by the security hearing but "no longer asked to assist in policy matters"
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1991· 2 entries
Awarded Ig Nobel Prize (1991).
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Was awarded one of the first Ig Nobel Prizes for Peace in recognition of his "lifelong efforts to change the meaning of peace as we know it"
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1990· 1 entry
The historian Barton Bernstein argued that it is an "unconvincing claim" by Teller that he was a "covert dissenter" to the use of the bomb
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1989· 1 entry
Made several visits to his country of origin, and paid careful attention to the political changes there
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1987· 1 entry
Teller published a book entitled Better a Shield than a Sword, which supported civil defense and active protection systems
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1986· 1 entry
Was awarded the United States Military Academy's Sylvanus Thayer Award
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1982· 1 entry
Won National Medal of Science (1982).
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1981· 1 entry
Teller became a founding member of the World Cultural Council
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1980· 1 entry
Won Eringen Medal (1980).
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1979· 1 entry
And blamed it on Jane Fonda, who had starred in The China Syndrome, which depicted a fictional reactor accident and was released less than two weeks before the Three Mile Island accident
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1976· 2 entries
Duckett testified in Congress before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that, after receiving information from an "American scientist", he drafted a National Intelligence Estimate on Israel's nuclear capability
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And in February 1982 he was appointed to President Reagan's "White House Science Council"
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1975· 2 entries
Awarded Harvey Prize (1975).
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Retired from both the lab and Berkeley, and was named director emeritus of the Livermore Laboratory and appointed Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution
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1967· 1 entry
When the Israeli nuclear program was nearing completion, Teller informed Neeman that he was going to tell the CIA that Israel had built nuclear weapons, and explain that it was justified by the background of the Six-Day
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1964· 1 entry
A connection between Teller and Israel was made by the physicist Yuval Ne'eman, who had similar political views
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1963· 1 entry
Which holds the Edward Teller endowed professorship in his honor
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1962· 1 entry
Awarded Enrico Fermi Award (1962).
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1961· 1 entry
Won Golden Plate Award (1961).
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1960· 1 entry
And an asteroid, 5006 Teller, is named after him
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1959· 2 entries
Awarded Remsen Award (1959).
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At a symposium organised by the American Petroleum Institute and the Columbia Graduate School of Business for the centennial of the American oil industry, Edward Teller warned that:
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1958· 2 entries
Awarded Albert Einstein Award (1958).
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The Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1961, the Enrico Fermi Award in 1962, the Herzl Prize in 1978, the Eringen Medal in 1980, the Harvey Prize in 1975, the National Medal of Science in 1983,
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1956· 1 entry
Attended the Project Nobska anti-submarine warfare conference, where discussion ranged from oceanography to nuclear weapons
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1954· 1 entry
When he testified against Oppenheimer at Oppenheimer's security clearance hearing
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1953· 2 entries
With Nicholas Metropolis, Arianna Rosenbluth, Marshall Rosenbluth, and Augusta Teller, Teller co-authored a paper that is a starting point for the application of the Monte Carlo method to statistical mechanics and the Ma
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Published “Equation of State Calculations by Fast Computing Machines” in The Journal of Chemical Physics — cited 29,995 times.
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1952· 3 entries
Teller became known in the press as the "father of the hydrogen bomb"
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Left Los Alamos and joined the newly established Livermore branch of the University of California Radiation Laboratory, which had been created largely through his urging
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Teller and Oppenheimer had a long meeting with David Ben-Gurion in Tel Aviv, telling him that the best way to accumulate plutonium was to burn natural uranium in a nuclear reactor
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1951· 1 entry
Teller and Ulam made a breakthrough and invented a new design, proposed in a classified March 1951 paper, On Heterocatalytic Detonations I: Hydrodynamic Lenses and Radiation Mirrors, for a practical megaton-range H-bomb
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1950· 1 entry
Calculations by the Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam and his collaborator Cornelius Everett, along with confirmations by Fermi, had shown that not only was Teller's earlier estimate of the quantity of tritium needed f
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1949· 1 entry
President Harry Truman announced a crash development program for a hydrogen bomb
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1946· 1 entry
To return to the University of Chicago as a professor and close associate of Fermi and Maria Goeppert Mayer
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1945· 1 entry
Which is essential for miniaturization and reliability and is used in all of today's nuclear weapons
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1942· 1 entry
Teller was invited to be part of Robert Oppenheimer's summer planning seminar at the University of California, Berkeley, on the origins of the Manhattan Project, the US effort to develop the first nuclear weapons
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1938· 1 entry
Published “Adsorption of Gases in Multimolecular Layers” in Journal of the American Chemical Society — cited 24,585 times.
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1937· 1 entry
Teller predicted the Jahn–Teller effect, which distorts molecules in certain situations; this affects the chemical reactions of metals, and in particular the coloration of certain metallic dyes
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1935· 1 entry
When, thanks to George Gamow, Teller was invited to the United States to become a professor of physics at George Washington University, where he worked with Gamow until 1941
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1933· 1 entry
Studied at University of Göttingen (1933).
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1932· 1 entry
Thus orienting Teller's scientific career in nuclear physics
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1930· 2 entries
Teller moved to the University of Göttingen, then one of the world's great centers of physics due to the presence of Max Born and James Franck, but after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, Germany
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Studied at Leipzig University, doctorate (1930).
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1929· 1 entry
Teller transferred to Leipzig University, where in 1930, he received his PhD in physics under Heisenberg
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1928· 1 entry
While still a student at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, he fell under a streetcar and his right foot was nearly severed
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1926· 1 entry
Partly due to the discriminatory numerus clausus rule under Miklós Horthy's regime
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1908· 3 entries
In Budapest, then part of Austria-Hungary, into a Jewish family
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Born 1908-01-15.
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Teller emigrated to the US in the 1930s, one of the many so-called "Martians", a group of Hungarian scientist émigrés
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