Edward Teller - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Teller was born in Budapest, Hungary (then Austria-Hungary) into a Jewish family in the year 1908. When he was very young, his grandfather told his mother not to be too unhappy that he was apparently an idiot, because he hadn't spoken by the age of three. A doctor suggested he might be mentally retarded. Teller had no interest in speaking because his father spoke Hungarian and very poor German, and his mother spoke German and very poor Hungarian. As a result, he decided that they didn't know what they were talking about. Despite being raised in a Jewish family, he later on became an agnostic. He became very interested in numbers, and would calculate in his head large numbers, such as the number of seconds in a year.

He left Hungary in 1926 (partly due to the numerus clausus rule under Horthy's regime). The political climate and revolutions in Hungary during his youth instilled a lingering animosity for both Communism and Fascism in Teller. When he was a young student, his right foot was severed in a streetcar accident in Munich, requiring him to wear a prosthetic foot and leaving him with a lifelong limp. Teller graduated in chemical engineering at the University of Karlsruhe and received his Ph.D. in physics under Werner Heisenberg at the University of Leipzig. Teller's Ph.D. dissertation dealt with one of the first accurate quantum mechanical treatments of the hydrogen molecular ion. In 1930 he befriended Russian physicists George Gamow and Lev Landau. Teller's lifelong friendship with a Czech physicist, George Placzek, was very important for Teller's scientific and philosophical development. It was Placzek who arranged a summer stay in Rome with Enrico Fermi for young Teller, thus orienting his scientific career in nuclear physics.

Teller spent two years at the University of Göttingen, and left in 1933 through the aid of the International Rescue Committee. He went briefly to England, and moved for a year to Copenhagen, where he worked under Niels Bohr. In February 1934, he married Augusta Maria "Mici" (pronounced "Mitzi") Harkanyi, the sister of a longtime friend.

In 1935, thanks to George Gamow's incentive, Teller was invited to the United States to become a Professor of Physics at George Washington University (GWU), where he worked with Gamow until 1941. Prior to the discovery of fission in 1939, Teller was engaged as a theoretical physicist, working in the fields of quantum, molecular, and nuclear physics. In 1941, after becoming a naturalized citizen of the United States, his interest turned to the use of nuclear energy, both fusion and fission.

At GWU, Teller predicted the Jahn–Teller effect (1937), which distorts molecules in certain situations; this affects the chemical reactions of metals, and in particular the coloration of certain metallic dyes. Teller and Hermann Arthur Jahn analyzed it as a piece of purely mathematical physics. In collaboration with Brunauer and Emmet, Teller also made an important contribution to surface physics and chemistry: the so-called Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) isotherm.

When World War II began, Teller wanted to contribute to the war effort. On the advice of the well-known Caltech aerodynamicist and fellow Hungarian émigré Theodore von Kármán, Teller collaborated with his friend Hans Bethe in developing a theory of shock-wave propagation. In later years, their explanation of the behavior of the gas behind such a wave proved valuable to scientists who were studying missile re-entry.