Edward Teller is perhaps best known for his belief in freedom through strong defense. But this extraordinary memoir at last reveals the man behind the headlines--passionate and humorous, devoted and loyal. Never before has Teller told his story as fully as he does here. We learn his true position on everything from the bombing of Japan to the pursuit of weapons research in the post-war years. In clear and compelling prose, Teller chronicles the people and events that shaped him as a scientist, beginning with his early love of music and math, and continuing with his study of quantum physics under Werner Heisenberg. He also describes his relationships with some of the century's greatest minds--Einstein, Bohr, Fermi, Szilard, von Neumann--and offers an honest assessment of the development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs, the founding of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, and his complicated relationship with J. Robert Oppenheimer.Rich and humanizing, this candid memoir describes the events that led Edward Teller to be honored or abhorred, and provides a fascinating perspective on the ability of a single individual to affect the course of history.
Writing even in overview of more than a half-century of professional life of a giant of twentieth century science and technology such as Edward Teller is a daunting task. We ask in advance the reader's pardon for passing over quickly or omitting entirely aspects of Teller's life and work which may seem of major significance but which we, due to differences of perspective or knowledge, speak too little or not at all. We refer those interested in greater depth to the excellent biography by Stanley Blumberg and Gwen Owens, The Life and Times of Edward Teller, and we have (with his permission) printed Professor Eugene Wigner's An Appreciation On the 60th Birthday of Edward Teller immediately after this foreword, so that the reader may consider the perspective of one of Teller's most illustrious contemporaries more than two decades ago. Edward Teller was born in Budapest, Hungary on January 15,1908. While his childhood was spent in the twilight of the Victorian age and its abrupt conclusion in the Great War and his youth in its especially turbulent after math in central Europe, he doesn't bear visible scars from it.
In Conversations on the Dark Secrets of Physics, Teller returns to the fundamentals of physics to share with readers his unbridled enthusiasm for the world of physical reality -- from the nature of molecules to quantum mechanics and superconductors, from the elementary laws of thermodynamics to how planets, asteroids, and comets develop their orbits. By simplifying the math and forgoing the often-confusing technical jargon, Teller helps the reader break through physic's bewildering formulas and equations and get to the wonders of our physical universe. A timeless and personal explanation of the importance of physics in our life, Conversations on the Dark Secrets of Physics is certain to become a classic.
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Fusion, Volume I: Magnetic Confinement, Part A is the first of the two-part volume that covers the complexity and application of controlled magnetic fusion. This book is divided into seven chapters and starts with a brief historical overview and some properties of controlled fusion. The subsequent chapters deal with the principles, thermodynamic stability, and configuration of Tokamak plasma. These topics are followed by discussions of the variations and application of stellarators; the concepts of mirror theory; and the establishment of the experimental basis of the mirror-confinement physics. The last chapter focuses on the principles, configuration, and application of the reversed-field pinch. This book will prove useful to physicists, physics students, and researchers.
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