Subsequently, he traveled from one prominent center of physics to another: Harvard, California Institute of Technology, Leyden, and Zurich. In , he received offers to teach at Caltech and the University of California at Berkeley. Accepting both, he divided his time between Pasadena and Berkeley, attracting his own circle of brilliant young physics students.
Oppenheimer in at the Shelter Island conference where theoretical physicists gathered to discuss the state of their field in the aftermath of World War II. From left to right, standing, are: W. Lamb, K. Darrow, Victor Weisskopf, George E. Uhlenbeck, Robert E. Marshak, Julian Schwinger, and David Bohm. From left to right, seated are: J. Feynman seated, with pen in hand , and Herman Feshbach. Here was a man who obviously understood all the deep secrets of quantum mechanics, and yet made it clear that the most important questions were unanswered.
His earnestness and deep involvement gave his research students the same sense of challenge. He never gave his students the easy and superficial answers but trained them to appreciate and work on the deep problems.
When Julius Oppenheimer died in , Oppenheimer became a wealthy man. It was in the s that Bethe achieved his greatest accomplishment by developing a theory for the production of energy in stars. It was work for which he would receive a Nobel Prize in Following the summer at Berkeley spent on the atomic bomb design, Bethe was recruited by Oppenheimer to head the theoretical division at the new weapons laboratory that was being set up in Los Alamos, New Mexico.
Teller was disappointed not to have been picked for the post himself. Bethe remembers that it, "was a severe blow to Teller, who Following the success of the Manhattan Project and the end of the war, Bethe returned to Cornell to resume teaching and his academic research.
When the Soviet Union conducted its first atomic test in August , Teller went to visit Bethe in the hopes of persuading him to return to Los Alamos to work on the superbomb. Bethe agonized over the decision. But ultimately he concluded that in a war fought with hydrogen bombs, "even if we were to win it, the world would not be We would lose the things we were fighting for.
Bethe remained vigorously opposed to the H-bomb throughout his life although, he continued to return to Los Alamos as a consultant. He became a member of the President's Science Advisory Committee in , a position he held until It was in this capacity that he was involved in the failed negotiations with the Soviet Union for a ban on nuclear testing. Nevertheless, he has continued to argue for slowing down the arms race and for nuclear disarmament.
In February , as the Senate was preparing for a debate on the ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the year-old physicist wrote a letter to President Clinton, urging him to stop not only all tests of nuclear weapons but also the sponsorship of "computational experiments, or even creative thought designed to produce new categories of nuclear weapons.
Of all the scientists who worked on the U. Described by one Nobel Prize winner in physics as "one of the most thoughtful statesmen of science," and by another as "a danger to all that's important," Teller was recognized by most of his colleagues as being one of the most imaginative and creative physicists alive.
But at the same time, his single-minded pursuit of the hydrogen bomb, and his autocratic style alienated many of the scientists he worked with. The man who would one day be known as the father of the hydrogen bomb in the U. He grew up during a particularly turbulent time in Hungarian history. Following a briefly successful communist regime in , the country was ruled by a virulently anti-semitic fascist dictator, Nicholas Horthy.
The political upheavals meant the young Teller was only too happy to leave his homeland in to study in Germany. In he got his PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Leipzig. Although he accepted a research post in following his graduation, Teller realized that Hitler's rise to power meant that he should leave Germany as soon as he could. Many years later he told his biographer that "the hope of making an academic career in Germany for a Jew existed before Hitler came and vanished the day he arrived.
His first years in the U. At the outbreak of the Second World War, scientists became aware that the nucleus of a uranium atom could be split releasing enormous amounts of energy. It began to seem feasible that this energy could be used to create a weapon of unprecedented power. Teller was among the first scientists recruited to work on the Manhattan Project that was working to develop such a bomb.
In September , before the United States had even built an A-bomb, he suggested to Teller that an atomic bomb might heat a mass of deuterium an isotope of hydrogen sufficiently to ignite a thermonuclear reaction.
In the summer of , when Teller joined a group of distinguished physicists who were brainstorming about a design for the atomic bomb, he diverted much of the discussion to the feasibility of a superbomb. Teller travelled to California with his old friend Hans Bethe who remembers that even on the way out to Berkeley Teller was already thinking about the super: "Teller told me that the fission bomb [atomic bomb] was all well and good and, essentially, was now a sure thing..
He said that what we really should think about was the possibility of Shortly after Teller arrived at the newly established weapons laboratory in Los Alamos, his obsession with the H-bomb caused tensions with other scientists, particularly Bethe.
Bethe remembers that "he declined to take charge of the group which would perform the detailed calculation on the implosion and since the theoretical division was very shorthanded it was necessary to bring in new scientists to do the work that Teller declined to do.
Teller left Los Alamos at the end of the war, returning to the University of Chicago. But when the Soviet Union conducted its first test of an atomic device in August , he did his best to drum up support for a crash program to build a hydrogen bomb.
Teller argued that a superbomb was essential to the very survival of the U. During the course of , Teller was frustrated with the progress of the program. When his initial concept for the bomb didn't appear to work, he insisted that the problem was caused by a shortage of theoreticians at Los Alamos and a lack of imagination. These accusations served to further distance him from the other scientists.
When he and mathematician Stanislaw Ulam finally came up with an H-bomb design that would work, Teller was not chosen to head the project. He left Los Alamos and soon joined the newly established Lawrence Livermore laboratory, a rival weapons lab in California. It was Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance hearings in that was the occasion for the final rift between Teller and many of his scientific colleagues. Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, had come under scrutiny because of his affiliation with left-leaning political organizations in the s and also because of his consistent opposition to the hydrogen bomb.
At Oppenheimer's hearings, Teller testified that "I feel I would prefer to see the vital interests of this country in hands that I understand better and therefore trust more. Teller has continued to be a tireless advocate of a strong defense policy, calling for the development of advanced thermonuclear weapons and continued nuclear testing.
During the Vietnam War his proposals so incensed radical protestors that some of them actually labeled him a "war criminal. The story that his wife Laura tells, is that Enrico Fermi's interest in physics can be traced back to the death of his older brother Giulio when Fermi was just The two boys, just a year apart in age, had been incredibly close. And Giulio's death left Enrico inconsolable. Shortly afterwards he found two old physics textbooks at market that were written by a Jesuit physicist in Fermi was so intrigued by them, he read them straight through, apparently, not even noticing that they were in Latin.
From that point on, physics consumed him. When Fermi was 17 he applied to the University of Pisa. His entry essay was so advanced that it amazed the examiner who thought it suitable for a graduating doctoral student. In he became a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Rome.
And in the s, he began a series of experiments in which he bombarded a variety of different elements with neutrons. Fermi did not realize until later that he had, in fact, succeeded in splitting the uranium atom.
It was for this work that the Nobel Committee awarded him the prize for physics. The call from Stockholm was a life-saver for the Fermi family. The night before, a bloody pogrom had taken place in Germany that became known as Kristallnacht. And just a few months earlier, the Italian Fascists had implemented a new anti-Semitic law that claimed: "Jews do not belong to the Italian race. The award ceremony gave the family an opportunity to escape Italy and emigrate to America.
At Columbia University in New York, Fermi realized that if neutrons are emitted in the fissioning of uranium then the emitted neutrons might proceed to split other uranium atoms, setting in motion a chain reaction that would release enormous amounts of energy.
Together with Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, Fermi ultimately succeeded in constructing the world's first atomic pile in a squash court under the stands of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago. And on December 2, , it produced the first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. Fermi had succeeded in taking one of the first steps to making an atomic bomb. One of the participants at that momentous occasion wrote: "Even though we had anticipated the success of the experiment, its accomplishment had a deep impact on us.
For some time we had known that we were about to unlock a giant; still we could not escape an eerie feeling when we knew we had actually done it. After working on the Manhattan Project during the war, Fermi was appointed to the General Advisory Committee, the panel of scientists that advised the Atomic Energy Commission.
After the meeting, Fermi and Isidor Rabi co-authored a minority addendum to the committee's report. It described the H-bomb in the harshest possible language: "It is clear that such a weapon cannot be justified on any ethical ground World War II altered irrevocably the status of science as a public good, and nothing revolutionized the scientific equation more than the race to build the first atomic bombs.
A race in name only, as the United States proved to be the sole serious contender. When in July , in the deserts of New Mexico, the Manhattan leadership witnessed the first atomic explosion, the nature of power in human civilization, and the role of science in delivering that power, had changed forever.
For many scientists, especially physicists, the new terms of their existence proved intoxicating. And Oppenheimer emerged as a luminary of almost blinding power. By the late s, however, the unanimity within the U. Pivotal figures, including Oppenheimer, advised against automatically taking the arms race to the next level: from atomic to hydrogen bombs.
Bush went so far as to join in a failed private campaign to delay, or cancel, the first test of an H bomb, scheduled by President Truman only days before a national election for his successor, won by Dwight Eisenhower. Yet Oppenheimer alone suffered the humiliation of losing his security clearance in a tortured secret hearing of the Atomic Energy Commission that he could have avoided by simply resigning from a government post whose term was expiring anyway. These may be the qualities of the born leader who seems to have reserves of uncommitted strength.
Not by any means.
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