Word: hungarian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Teller's hectic schedule has damaged his health: suffering from ulcerative colitis, he takes daily doses of atropine and phenobarbital, sticks to a doctor-ordered diet, painful for a man who devours food with Hungarian gusto. But a damaged constitution has not damped his crusader's fervor. The late great Nuclear Physicist Enrico Fermi once said to him, with affectionate exasperation: "In my acquaintance, you are the only monomaniac with several manias." Princeton Physicist John Wheeler, who worked on both the A-bomb and the H-bomb, put it more truly. The essence of Teller's character...
...Lost War. Edward Teller's intense concern with the menace of tyranny traces back to his Hungarian childhood. When Teller was born, in 1908, into a Jewish family with culture and money, citizens of gay, well-fed Budapest could believe that the world was solid, dependable. But Austria-Hungary got into World War 1 on the losing side, and the seemingly solid world crumbled. Defeated Hungary lost two-thirds of its prewar territory, and the country's economy collapsed in wild inflation. With the nation's life disrupted and anti-Semitism rampant, Teller's father dinned...
...today, a "square" (pronounced, in his thick accent, "skvare"). Favorite amusements were chess, hiking, poetry and music. Among the subjects of his poems was a chum's brainy, grey-eyed younger sister, Mici (pronounced Mitzi), who shared young Teller's enthusiasm for mathematics and that special Hungarian passion, pingpong. Eventually they were married...
Like all young Hungarian scientists in those days. Teller took his Ph.D. in Germany (University of Leipzig). When Hitler took power in 1933, Teller was at Gottingen, pursuing research in the molecular structure of matter. With the anti-Semitism that darkened his childhood raging about him again, he eagerly grabbed at a British rescue mission's offer of a lecturer's post at London University. Two years later he moved on to the U.S. to take up a physics professor's duties at the District of Columbia's George Washington University...
Snarled Threads. Seven months before the outbreak of World War 11, scientists in the U.S. learned with alarm that physicists in Germany had succeeded in bringing about atomic fission. Shortly afterward, the U.S. incurred the first major installment of its massive debt to Hungarian-born scientists. Physicist Leo Szilard, leaping in thought from laboratory fission to atomic bomb, set out to urge the U.S. Government to get an atomic-research project going. Reasoning that a letter to President Roosevelt would have maximum impact if signed by Einstein, Szilard recruited his fellow Hungarian Edward Teller to chauffeur him out to Peconic...