An Afternoon with Dr

An Afternoon with Dr. Teller

On September 2000, Tom Boster had the privilege of renewing his association with Dr. Edward Teller. Tom traveled to Stanford University and met with Dr. Teller at the Hoover Institute, where Dr. Teller is a senior research fellow.

Dr. Teller and Tom at the Hoover Institute on the Stanford University campus

Tom worked with Dr. Teller at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on x-ray diagnostics and x-ray lasers during the 1970s. During the private afternoon meeting, the discussion ranged from helpful hints on a future lecture that Tom was to give in Ohio, to the help given by Dr. Teller to Tom in publishing articles on intense monochromatic x-ray lines discovered in Tom's work at the Nevada Test Site near Las Vegas. Dr. Teller (to Tom's surprise) gave a complete review of the stage play Copenhagen and related to Tom many details of the clandestine meeting between the famous Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, and the German physicist, Werner Heisenberg, in occupied Denmark during World War II. Dr. Heisenberg, Nobel prize winner in physics (1932), was the Ph.D. advisor to Dr. Teller at the University of Leipzig in Germany. Dr. Bohr, Nobel prize winner in physics (1922), was a friend and mentor to both Dr. Heisenberg and Dr. Teller.

Edward Teller was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1908 and was one in the galaxy of star nuclear physicists who studied in, and became refugees from, prewar Germany in the Einstein era. He was a physicist at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory during World War II and later became its Assistant Director. His efforts were instrumental in establishing the Livermore Branch of the University of California Radiation Laboratory in 1952. Teller served as Director of the Livermore Laboratory and in 1960 was named Professor of Physics at Large for the University of California. He later chaired the Department of Applied Science at UC Davis, Livermore extension. In 1975 he was named Director Emeritus of the Lab and was also appointed Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institute, positions that he still holds.

Dr. Teller has received numerous awards for his contributions to physics and in public life has published more than a dozen books on subjects ranging from energy policy to national defense issues. He has been awarded the Albert Einstein Award, the National Medal of Science and Israel's Harvey Prize. Dr. Teller is known as the "Father of the Hydrogen Bomb" and is recognized as the person who initiated the concept of "Star Wars" or SDI (The Strategic Defense Initiative).

Reprinted from The Reconstructor, Newsletter of Boster, Kobayashi & Associates.
Volume 3, Issue 1, Summer 2001.

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