Teller, Edward 1908-
US physicist

Born in Budapest, Hungary, he graduated in chemical engineering at Karlsruhe, studied theoretical physics at the universities of Munich and G�ttingen, and under Niels Bohr at Copenhagen. He left Germany in 1933, lectured in London and Washington (1935) and contributed profoundly to the modern explanation of solar energy. He worked on the Manhattan atomic bomb project (1941-46), and joined Robert Oppenheimer's theoretical study group at Berkeley, California, where he was director of the new nuclear laboratories at Livermore (1958-60). From 1963 to 1966 he was chairman of the department of applied science at California University, then University Professor (1971-75). He repudiated any moral implications of his work, stating that, but for Oppenheimer's moral qualms, the USA might have had hydrogen bombs in 1947. After Russia's first atomic test (1949) he was one of the architects of President Harry S Truman's crash programme to build and test (1952) the world's first hydrogen bomb. Since 1975 he has been Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution. A recent publication is Conversations on the Dark Secrets of Physics (1991).

Bibliography: Stanley A Blumberg and Gwinn Owens, Energy and Conflict: The Life and Times of Edward Teller (1976)