Word: teller
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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...
...this has great relevance to me," says Teller. "I have seen, in Hungary, at least one society that was once healthy go completely to the dogs. I have seen the consequences of a lost war. I have also seen very many people, with all the evidence before them, refuse to believe what they...
...high-school days in Budapest, Teller was, as he puts it 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...