Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics [Hardcover]

Edward Teller (Author), Judith Shoolery (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 073820532X | ISBN-13: 978-0738205328 | Publication Date: October 16, 2001 | Edition: 1

The story of Edward Teller is the story of the twentieth century. Born in Hungary in 1908, Teller witnessed the rise of Nazism and anti-Semitism, two world wars, the McCarthy era, and the changing face of big science. A brilliant and controversial figure whose work on nuclear weapons was key to the American war effort, Teller has long believed in freedom through strong defense, a philosophy reflected in his stance on arms control and nuclear policy. These extraordinary recollections at last reveal the man behind the headlines-passionate and humorous, devoted and loyal. In clear and compelling prose, Teller tells of the people, events, and ideas that shaped him as a scientist, beginning with his early love of music and math, and continuing with his study of quantum physics with Werner Heisenberg. Present at many of the pivotal moments in modern science, Teller also describes his friendships with some of the century's greatest minds-Einstein, Bohr, Fermi, Szilard, von Neumann, Oppenheimer-and offers an honest account of the development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs. He also offers a moving portrait of his childhood, his marriage and family life, and his friendship with physicist Maria Mayer. Writing about those aspects of his life that have had important public consequences-from his conservative politics to his relationships with scientists and presidents-Teller reveals himself to be a man with deep beliefs about liberty, security, and the moral responsibility of science.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

One of the great scientists of the 20th century recounts a brilliant life spanning 10 decades in his simply titled autobiography, Memoirs. Edward Teller came to the United States from Hungary in 1935 and found a place for himself at the thorny intersection of science and politics: he was deeply involved in the decision to build a hydrogen bomb during the Second World War as well as the push for missile defenses during the 1980s. His most controversial act may have been his small role in the ordeal of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who lost security clearance due to suspicious affiliations with Communist organizations. Teller says he disagreed with many of his colleague's views, but did not consider him a traitor. He also expresses remorse that his own congressional testimony was used against Oppenheimer: "I proved not only that stupidity is a general human property but that I possessed a full share of it." The bulk of Memoirs concentrates on events during the 1940s and 1950s, though Teller's influence on President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative receives plenty of attention too. --John Miller

From Publishers Weekly

Teller's isn't a household name today, but in the 1950s he was dubbed "the father of the hydrogen bomb." Born in Hungary in 1908, Teller was educated in Germany, where he worked with some of the century's great scientists prior to the Nazi takeover. After arriving in the United States in 1935, he collaborated with other distinguished ‚migr‚s, such as Enrico Fermi and fellow Hungarian John von Neumann; he was one of the first scientists dispatched to Los Alamos, where he worked on the theoretical aspects of atom bomb design. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki came troubling years: Teller encountered great opposition to future nuclear research from the scientific community and found former friends unwilling to shake his hand after he testified against J. Robert Oppenheimer in Oppenheimer's 1954 security review. Later, Teller went on to establish the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories as a center for ground-breaking research in many fields, and in the late 1950s became a scientific consultant to Nelson Rockefeller. As is often the case with memoirs, time is relative: the years in the book's last half move much more quickly than those in the first. This is unfortunate, since Teller's work on safe proliferation of nuclear energy, the so-called Stars Wars defense system and the early detection of earth-crossing objects is almost as important as his work during the first part of his career. While waiting for a future biographer to give the latter years their proper due, readers can enjoy these panoramic and beautifully written recollections of one of the great scientific, if controversial, figures of all time.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 544 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; 1 edition (October 16, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 073820532X
• ISBN-13: 978-0738205328
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #513,561 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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37 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars He certainly drives the left over the top., December 2, 2001

By 

Richard F. Weyand (Naperville, IL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics (Hardcover)

In the interests of full disclosure, I will note from the first that I am Edward Teller's son-in-law, and something of a fan. I am also a physicist, however, trained in Urbana, and my views on Dr. Teller and the controversies surrounding him antedate my meeting him (and his daughter) by over a decade.

It being the first review of Teller's book on amazon.com, I read F. Sweet's review with some interest. I especially liked the material he 'added' to the book. The story about communist soldiers urinating in Teller's mother's favorite potted palm is a great story, but it isn't in the book. As far as I know it simply isn't true. Neither does Teller recount how his anti-communism began during the brief communist government period in his native Hungary when he was a child.

Indeed, on pages 181-183 of the book, Teller goes into some detail about how his feelings toward communism developed, which was surprising to me for how *late* it occurred. Some quotations from these pages are of interest:

'I had ambivalent feelings about the experiment going on in Russia.' [This about 1930]

'My first indication that something about the communist world was peculiar came in 1931 [at age 23].'

'But I still had not made up my mind. Charles Critchfield, one of our graduate students at George Washington, remembers that as late as 1937 I believed that the experiment in Russia might be the answer to that nation's political and economic problems.'

The seminal events leading to Teller's ultimate rejection of communism, as recounted in the book, were the show trials and executions of the 1930s, the arrest of friend and fellow physicist Lev Landau in Russia in 1938 or 1939, and reading Arthur Koestler's 'Darkness at Noon', published in 1938, which marked that author's profound change of mind from strong pro-communist to equally strong anti-communist. My own political views (libertarian), for example, were formed at a much younger age.

On another topic, Oppenheimer's career was not ruined by Teller. Oppenheimer's security clearance was revoked because of his lying in security interviews during the 1940s, at least according to Dr. Gordon Gray, who chaired the three-member panel and cast the deciding vote. After his security clearance was revoked, Oppenheimer was head of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton for many years, a prestigious post that would be the capstone of anyone's career. Teller spends considerable time discussing the hearing and his testimony and its aftermath, and includes his testimony verbatim in an appendix.

It is true that Oppenheimer had no more influence over US nuclear weapons policy, for which I am very grateful. (...)

The left has (...) never gotten over the discovery that Soviet communism was not a good system, and that Joseph Stalin was not a nice person. Teller came to these conclusions during the late 1930s; the left's hero, Andre Sakharov, came to the same conclusions over 20 years later, after providing the tyrant with the hydrogen bomb. How did the man who provided the hydrogen bomb to the West come to be so reviled by the left, while Stalin's arms designer was beatified? Was he right too early?

Ah, well. Even at 92, Edward Teller can still drive the left completely over the top. The large controversies with which he has been associated over the last 60 years provide plenty of room for reasoned disagreement and principled discussion. People on both sides of the great political issues affecting science (or should that be the great scientific issues affecting politics?) should find this book of interest for the clarity with which it expresses Teller's world view and how it developed.

Mr. Sweet does give credit for the quality of the writing in the book, which is, I suspect, due in no small part to Judy Shoolery. I picked it up and burned through all 569 pages in two days over a weekend, and couldn't put the darned thing down. Teller brings the names of the great men whose work I studied in undergraduate and graduate school to life with stories, amusing anecdotes, and great sorrows as well.

Now, it must be said that I am in fact a biased reviewer, but it is hard to claim that I am any more biased than Mr. Sweet. Readers who wish a more evenhanded treatment of the book than perhaps either one of us has managed would be well-advised to consult the review in the November issue of Physics Today (which is also posted on their website) by Hans Bethe, who was present for many of the events related in the book and can therefore speak from personal knowledge. Bethe also stood on the other side of many of the great controversies from Teller; together they are the last two of the great age of physics, one on either side of a large political divide.

22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great Christmas gift for the inquisitive, December 3, 2001

By 

Vince Page (Brookshire, TX USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics (Hardcover)

It is unfortunate that several reviews of this book in leading newspapers have belittled the man who is Edward Teller, as well as his career. Such reviews tell more about the reviewer than they do about Teller's memoirs, which are absolutely fascinating.

Edward Teller had the good fortune to be right where major work in physics was taking place throughout his career. When the hotbed of physics research was in Hungary, he was in Hungary; when it was in Germany, he was in Germany; when it was in England, he was in England, and when it finally moved to America, so did Edward Teller.

A man who is obviously passionate about applying scientific knowledge to solve problems, Teller decided long ago that consequences are for politicians to handle, scientists should only be concerned with furthering mankind's knowledge to the best of their ability.

This, Teller has done in remarkable fashion, and his memoirs allow you to tag along for the ride as he and others perform the mental gymnastics necessary to unlock the secrets of the atom. Far from being a dry technical treatise, however, Teller and Shoolery are surprisingly good at detailing the personalities behind the people, including those of Neils Bohr, J. Robert Oppenheimer (whose first name is Julius, we discover in the book), Enrico Fermi, Lev Landau and others whom most of us have only read about in passing when we were in school. We are also permitted to glimpse more than a few touching moments with his late wife Mici and his son, which reveal the depth of his affection.

He also delves into the political proclivities of his associates, a surprising number of which had socialist and communist tendencies. An appendix gives relevant portions of his testimony during the Congressional investigation into Robert Oppenheimer.

And the book doesn't concentrate on the atom bomb, either. Teller's career covers collaboration on an inherently safe nuclear reactor using hydride fuel (which we still are not yet using for electrical power production in the United States) to work on several ballistic missile defense systems from smart rocks to brilliant pebbles (which, we learn in the book, would protect the entire northern hemisphere -- including Russia -- if deployed). And at the end of the book, Teller gives us his view on where science, people and politics should go from here.

If you have an inquisitive bone in your body, you will thoroughly enjoy this book. All things considered, it is one of the best I've read in a long time. It's a shame that those who differ with Teller's point of view on some issues chose to take it out on his memoirs. This book is fascinating -- but I already said that, didn't I.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Captivating memoir, September 21, 2003

By 

Dan S. Bloomberg (Palo Alto, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics (Paperback)

If you have an interest in the history of science
and technology, and in the scientific personalities who
carried out the revolution in physics in the first
half of the 20th century, you will be captivated
by this book.

I picked it up because of my interest in
the history of physics, and because Teller has
held such a central role in the transformation
from small science to Big Science.
Hans Bethe, with whom Teller had some difficulties
during the Manhattan Project, reviewed the book
very positively in Physics Today. I was prepared
to continue to dislike Teller, because of his testimony
in the Oppenheimer hearings and his advocacy of Star
Wars, but he nevertheless quickly won me over.

Teller comes across, in his own account, as a
collegial, cooperative, driven man, who cared
greatly about both his scientific and technical work
and his relations with his colleagues.
After Teller's 1954 testimony at the Oppenheimer
security clearance hearing, Teller was vilified.
Here, he gets to explain why he testified as he
did, and how it was just one of several very
stupid things that he did in his career. (The
stupid thing in this case was to neglect to
explain that his uncertainty about Oppenheimer's
clearance was due to a transcript he was shown
about Oppenheimer's fabricated story
that implicated his friend Chevalier, and
not to Oppenheimer's opposition to development
of the H-bomb, which was widely shared among
physics academics.)

Teller makes an effort to explain the scientific
challenges in his work, such as in the early
days of quantum mechanics when he worked on
molecular dynamics. For example, he explains
Landau's reaction to what is now called the
Jahn-Teller effect (and which Teller says should be
called the "Landau-Jahn-Teller effect"), giving the
basic physical principle involved and the reason for
Landau's initial puzzlement.

Teller played an important role after WW2 in
setting up the engineering principles necessary
to make nuclear reactors safe, and in getting them
implemented.

There are many delightful anecdotes, and even
some poems that Teller wrote. His lifelong friend
Maria Goppert Mayer saved all his letters, and
these provided much material that Teller
used to refresh his memory and select from.

I found the period from 1946 until the establishment
of Livermore Lab particularly interesting and
suspenseful. This book leaves no doubt that
Teller led a fascinating life.