Word: teller
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When the Los Alamos bombmakers scattered, Teller accepted an invitation to work with Enrico Fermi at Chicago's Institute for Nuclear Studies. Teller kept urging an H-bomb program, but nobody seemed interested...
...Teller had to make an agonizing decision: either accept the G.A.C. verdict against his own passionate conviction that it endangered the nation, or fight the decision, with little chance of winning, and at the cost of ostracism by many of his fellow scientists. He chose to fight, joined forces with Atomic Energy Commissioner Lewis Strauss in the struggle that pitted them against popular Robert Oppenheimer and split the ranks of U.S. scientists for years afterward...
...dragged on for half a year after the Russians exploded "Joe One." Then, in late January 1950, a shocking bit of intelligence decided the issue: German-born British Physicist Klaus Fuchs confessed that he had passed atomic secrets to Communist agents. Fuchs had been present at Los Alamos when Teller & Co. reviewed all that was known about thermonuclear reactions. Four days after Fuchs's confession, Harry Truman directed AEC to go ahead with the H-bomb...
Putting more money into basic research is only the beginning, the easy part, as Edward Teller and his fellow scientists see it. The tough problem is to bring about a drastic improvement in science education in the nation's high schools in order to ensure an adequate supply of scientists in the future. Only one U.S. high-school student out of two dozen takes any physics at all, and only one out of four takes algebra...
Science & Baseball. There is one underlying reason, in Edward Teller's view, for both the neglect of science education and the lack of appreciation for pure research: "A tone deafness toward science in our .society at large." If the public had an ear for science, then the taxpayers would be more willing to support pure research and science education, and more schoolchildren would get interested in science. Like many gifted scientists, Teller believes there is no special inborn talent for science, feels that talent is basically intense interest. The way to produce future scientists is to get them interested...