Bacon's Proof: The Career and Controversies of Edward Teller.

• Author: Schulman, Adam
• Position: Books

Edward Teller (with Judith. L. Shoolery), Memoirs: A Twentieth-century Journey in Science and Politics (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2001), 628 pp., $35.

NEARLY 400 years ago, Francis Bacon heralded the dawn of a new era of science and technology, when knowledge and power would be joined in one goal and scientists, rather than priests, would provide authoritative guidance for humanity. Henceforth, according to Bacon, scientists would secure and augment their prestige in society not so much by their dazzling theoretical insights as by the mastery of nature that their practicable science would confer on other men. Bacon predicted that the fruits of the new science would include not only inventions for the relief of human misery but also weapons of immense destructive power.

The Baconian project seemed to reach its zenith in the mid-20th century, when a small group of brilliant theoretical physicists unlocked the secrets of nuclear energy and collaborated on the invention of the nuclear reactor and the atom and hydrogen bombs. Edward Teller, now 94 years old, is among the last survivors of that titanic generation of physicists who permanently altered our world through their work on the Manhattan Project. Teller, who was involved in the race to build the atom bomb from its inception, is now famous--or more often notorious--as "the father of the hydrogen bomb." But Teller was also an early member of that select band of European theoretical physicists who, in the decades between the two world wars, laid the foundations of quantum mechanics, the comprehensive theory of matter and energy on which our understanding of nature now rests.

Teller's memoirs, written with the aid of Judith Shoolery, are a fascinating record of the mutual entanglement of theoretical physics and world politics in the 20th century. Perhaps never again will a handful of theoretical scientists wield the enormous influence on world history that Teller and his colleagues exercised in the final months of World War II. Besides being an informative insider's account of those extraordinary times, Teller's memoirs are also valuable as the personal account of a man who pursued the twofold Baconian vision in its starkest form: to probe the fundamental nature of physical reality and to bring into the world devastating weapons of mass destruction.(1)

EDWARD TELLER was born in Budapest in 1908. His early years are notable chiefly for the friendships he formed with three other young Hungarians, all of them destined to become world-famous physicists who aided the Manhattan Project in decisive ways: Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann and Leo Szilard. The four friends, all of them Jewish, were destined to immigrate to the United States, fleeing European anti-semitism in general and the Nazis in particular. It is, of course, one of history's great ironies that Hitler's persecution of the Jews led to a vast intellectual westward migration, chiefly but not exclusively Jewish, which, among its other effects, greatly enhanced the intellectual firepower of the Allied war effort.(2)

Teller recounts his early experiences as a young theorist in the heady days of the birth of quantum mechanics. As with so many young physicists of the time, Teller's early career consisted mainly of an itinerant apprenticeship at the great scientific centers of Europe. Teller earned his doctorate under Werner Heisenberg in Leipzig, worked with Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker in Gottingen, and studied with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. In 1932 he paid a memorable visit to Rome where he began a lifelong friendship with Enrico Fermi who, among many brilliant achievements, was the first to...