The Scientist as Rebel (22 page)

Teller is also intensely interested in science. The high point of his life, as he describes it, was the brief golden age of German science, the seven years that he spent in Germany from 1926 to 1933, between the discovery of quantum mechanics and the advent of Hitler. During those years he worked on the boundary between physics and chemistry, understanding the implications of quantum mechanics for the structure and spectroscopy of molecules. He describes himself as a
problem solver rather than a deep thinker. After the deep thinking had been done by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger, the road was open for problem solvers, such as Teller and his friends Hans Bethe and Lev Landau and George Gamow and Enrico Fermi, to apply the new ideas to practical problems. Using the new ideas, the problem solvers rebuilt physics and chemistry from the bottom up. Those seven years were indeed a golden age, when every young physicist could find important problems to solve, and when the number of physicists was so small that everyone knew everyone. Teller enjoyed the intense intellectual excitement of those years, and enjoyed even more the intense intellectual friendships. Like his friend Bethe, Teller was something of a poet. For a birthday party of Max Born in Göttingen, Teller composed a splendid song in German, with the rhythm and melody of the “Mack the Knife” tune from Brecht’s
Threepenny Opera
. As a child, Teller was bilingual in Hungarian and German. Unfortunately, he says, he was eight years old before he began learning English, already too old to acquire the intimacy with words that a poet needs. After he moved to America and had to live his life in English, he stopped writing poems.

He sailed to America in 1935 on the same ship as Bethe, and taught physics at George Washington University while Bethe taught at Cornell. At
GWU
he was among old friends from Europe, Gamow and George Placzek and Maria Mayer. The first three years in America, from 1936 to 1938, were peaceful. Teller maintained his old friendships and made many new ones. The atmosphere of the golden age of German physics was almost recreated in America. Then, in December 1938, fission was discovered in Germany, and Teller’s life was irreversibly changed. With Leo Szilard, another old friend from Hungary, he went to Einstein and persuaded Einstein to sign the famous letter that warned President Roosevelt of the possible military importance of fission. And from that time until today, Teller’s life has been dominated by nuclear weapons. His experiences in Germany
had burned into his soul the lesson that it was a fatal error for academic people to be unconcerned with the defense of freedom.

The second half of this book contains a detailed account of Teller’s involvement with weaponry, first at Columbia, then in turn at Chicago, Los Alamos, and Livermore, and finally at Stanford. One might expect the narrative in this part of the book to become more political and less personal. But here too, even when Teller is most heavily engaged in political battles, he portrays his opponents as human beings and describes their concerns fairly. There is sadness in his account but no bitterness. The greatest sadness is the personal sadness, when three of his close friends and allies, Enrico Fermi, John von Neumann, and Ernest Lawrence, die untimely deaths before their work is done. Throughout his struggles he maintains his talent for friendship. Szilard, who disagreed violently with Teller about almost everything, remained one of his closest friends.

The worst period of Teller’s life began in 1954 when he testified against J. Robert Oppenheimer in the hearing conducted by the Atomic Energy Commission to decide whether Oppenheimer was a security risk. The full transcript of Teller’s testimony is included in the book. One result of Teller’s testimony was that a large number of his friends ceased to be friends. The community of physicists that Teller loved was split apart. The hearing had been instigated by Oppenheimer’s enemies in order to demonize him and destroy his political influence. After the hearing, it was Teller’s turn to be demonized. Oppenheimer and Teller both suffered grievously from the quarrel, but the damage to Teller was greater. I remember meeting Bethe in Washington while the hearing was in progress, shortly before Teller testified. Bethe was looking grimmer than I had ever seen him. He said, “I have just now had the most unpleasant conversation of my whole life. With Edward Teller.” Bethe had tried to persuade Teller not to testify and had failed. That was the end of a twenty-year friendship. Bethe and Teller are now the last survivors of the golden
age. I was happy to read in
Physics Today
a review of this book by Bethe, a generous review, emphasizing the warmth of Teller’s character and letting old quarrels sleep.

Teller’s account of his testimony has been challenged by the historian Gregg Herken in a less generous review of this book in
Science
. Herken emphasizes some details in Teller’s account that disagree with historical documents. But a historian should be familiar with the fact that all human memories of past events are unreliable. Memoirs are not history. They are the raw material of history. Memoirs written by generals and politicians are notoriously inaccurate. When I wrote my own memoirs some years ago, I was amazed to discover how many things I remembered that never happened. Memory not only distorts but also invents. A writer of memoirs should make an honest effort to set down the course of events as they are recorded in memory. This Teller has done. If some of the details are wrong, that detracts little from the value of this book as a panorama of a historical epoch in which Teller played a leading role. His account of his testimony in the Oppenheimer hearing ends with the statement, “I proved not only that stupidity is a general human property but that I possessed a full share of it.” When Oppenheimer was asked by his interrogator during the hearing why he had lied to security officers, he replied, “Because I was an idiot.” Teller is saying that he was an idiot too, when he voluntarily agreed to take part in a dirty business. That is Teller’s conclusion, and it is a fair summary of his role in the affair.

Teller was not only the main inventor of the hydrogen bomb but also the main driving force pushing its development. For this he makes no apology. He believes that United States’ possession of the hydrogen bomb was essential to the peaceful resolution of the cold war. But he also writes admiringly of Andrei Sakharov, who pushed the development of hydrogen bombs in the Soviet Union for similar reasons. Hydrogen bombs on both sides of the cold war were essential to keeping it cold. One evening during the 1960s, I was drinking
beer in Germany with a German friend who had spent most of the Second World War as an infantry officer in Russia. He talked eloquently of the joys of the Russian campaign, how civilian life was petty and boring compared with the heroism he had witnessed in Russia, how his years as a soldier in Russia were the best years of his life. Then he pointed a finger at me and said, “If it were not for your damned hydrogen bombs, we would be back in Russia today.” At that moment I was thinking, “Thank God for Edward Teller and his bombs.”

Some of the most illuminating passages in the book are extracts from letters written by Teller to Maria Mayer. Mayer was a first-rate physicist and also the friend to whom Teller confided his feelings at moments of maximum stress. Here is a passage written in early 1950, when Teller was engaged at Los Alamos in his lonely struggle to build a hydrogen bomb, a year before the crucial invention that made the bomb possible: “Whatever help and whatever advice I can get from you—I need it. Not because I feel subjectively that I must have help, but because I know objectively that we are in a situation in which any sane person must and does throw up his hands and only the crazy ones keep going.”

Another illuminating passage is a quote from a letter written in 1939 by Merle Tuve, a senior physicist who knew Teller during his years at George Washington University. Somebody at the University of Chicago had asked Tuve for an appraisal of Teller. Tuve replied, “If you want a genius for your staff, don’t take Teller, get Gamow. But geniuses are a dime a dozen. Teller is something much better. He helps everybody. He works on everybody’s problem. He never gets into controversies or has trouble with anyone. He is by far your best choice.” That was the Teller I knew when I worked with him for three months in 1956 on the design of a safe nuclear reactor. It was easy to disagree fiercely about the details of the reactor, as we often did, and remain friends. He helped everybody and worked on everybody’s
problem. There was of course another Teller, the Teller who worked crazily for unpopular causes such as hydrogen bombs and missile defense, and who fought furiously for the causes that he believed in. This book gives us a fair portrait of both Tellers, the Teller who gave generous help to young scientists and the Teller who quarreled vehemently with older scientists. Those who disagreed with him did him a grave injustice when they tried to turn him into a demon.

TIMOTHY FERRIS IS
a serious amateur astronomer. He spends a substantial amount of his time and money roaming around at night among planets and stars and galaxies. He owns a place called Rocky Hill Observatory in California where he can stargaze to his heart’s content through telescopes of modest size and excellent quality. He belongs to the international community of observers who are linked by the Internet as well as by the shared sky in which they are at home. Serious amateur astronomers, unless they are retired or independently wealthy, must have a day job to support their nocturnal addiction. Ferris has a day job as a writer of books explaining science to the general public. He has written many books which are widely read and have effectively reduced the level of scientific illiteracy of the American population.

Seeing in the Dark: How Backyard Stargazers Are Probing Deep Space and Guarding Earth from Interplanetary Peril
¹
is similar to the others in some respects and different in others. Like his previous books, it is factually accurate, it contains a wealth of information about the universe we live in, and it makes the information easily digestible by seasoning it with good stories. Unlike his other books, it
is a love story, describing how Ferris fell in love with astronomy at the age of nine and how this passion has enriched his life ever since. But he does not write much about himself. The book is mainly a portrait gallery of the diverse and colorful characters who have shared his passion, with a description of the contributions that they have made to the science of astronomy.

Ferris has sought out his amateur astronomical colleagues, visited them in their homes and observatories, listened to their life stories, and watched them at work. One of these colleagues is Patrick Moore, who has also supported himself by writing popular science books in the daytime while exploring the sky at night. Ferris visited him in the English village of Selsey where he lives and works. Many years ago, before any human beings or human instruments had surveyed the back side of the moon from space, Moore was observing the moon systematically with his small telescope at Selsey.

The moon normally keeps a fixed orientation as it revolves around the Earth, so that only the front side is visible. But it wobbles slightly in its orbit, so that occasionally some regions that are normally invisible can be seen at the edge of the visible face, extremely foreshortened and inconspicuous. Moore was studying these normally invisible regions at a moment when the moon’s wobble was at a maximum, and discovered Mare Orientale, the biggest and most beautiful impact crater on the moon. Moore gave it the name Mare Orientale, Eastern Sea, because it is hidden behind the eastern edge of the moon and because it is a dark circular region similar to the dark regions on the front side of the moon which the amateur astronomer Johannes Hevelius called seas when he mapped them in 1647.

Hevelius was a brewer in Danzig who made the first accurate map of the moon. Even at times of maximum wobble, only a small part of Mare Orientale can be seen from the Earth. Only an observer with long experience and deep knowledge of lunar topography could have recognized it in the fragmentary view of the moon’s edge that Moore
could see from Selsey. Professional astronomers do not have such experience or such knowledge. Only an amateur could have discovered Mare Orientale, because only an amateur has the time and the motivation to study a single region of the moon with single-minded dedication.

Patrick Moore is one of many examples illustrating the main theme of Ferris’s book. The theme is the importance of amateurs in the exploration of the universe, not only in past centuries but also today. Moore was an old-fashioned amateur when he discovered Mare Orientale, observing the moon laboriously with his eye at the telescope, drawing maps of his observations with pencil and paper. Amateurs today observe the sky with digital electronic cameras, recording the images with personal computers using commercial software. The role of amateurs has become more important in the last twenty years because of the advent of cheap mass-produced electronic cameras, computers, and software. Serious amateurs today can afford to own equipment that few professional observatories could afford twenty years ago. Personal computers are used not only to record data but to communicate rapidly with other observers and to coordinate observations all over the world.

There are many areas of research that only professional astronomers can pursue, studying faint objects far away in the depths of space, using large telescopes that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build and operate. Only professionals can reach halfway back to the beginning of time, to explore the early universe as it was when galaxies were young and the oldest stars were being born. Only professionals have access to telescopes in space that can detect the X-rays emitted by matter heated to extreme temperatures as it falls into black holes.