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| signature = Edward Teller signature.svg | spouse = |Two children}} }} Edward Teller ((ハンガリー語:Teller Ede); January 15, 1908 – September 9, 2003) was a Hungarian-born American theoretical physicist who is known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb", although he claimed he did not care for the title.〔"I have always considered that description in poor taste." .〕 He made numerous contributions to nuclear and molecular physics, spectroscopy (in particular, the Jahn–Teller and Renner–Teller effects) and surface physics. His extension of Enrico Fermi's theory of beta decay, in the form of the so-called Gamow–Teller transitions, provided an important stepping stone in its application, while the Jahn–Teller effect and the Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) theory have retained their original formulation and are still mainstays in physics and chemistry. Teller also made contributions to Thomas–Fermi theory, the precursor of density functional theory, a standard modern tool in the quantum mechanical treatment of complex molecules. In 1953, along with Nicholas Metropolis and Marshall Rosenbluth, Teller co-authored a paper which is a standard starting point for the applications of the Monte Carlo method to statistical mechanics. Teller emigrated to the United States in the 1930s, and was an early member of the Manhattan Project, charged with developing the first atomic bombs. During this time he made a serious push to develop the first fusion-based weapons as well, but these were deferred until after World War II. After his controversial testimony in the security clearance hearing of his former Los Alamos Laboratory superior J. Robert Oppenheimer, Teller was ostracized by much of the scientific community. He continued to find support from the U.S. government and military research establishment, particularly for his advocacy for nuclear energy development, a strong nuclear arsenal, and a vigorous nuclear testing program. He was a co-founder of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), and was both its director and associate director for many years. In his later years, Teller became especially known for his advocacy of controversial technological solutions to both military and civilian problems, including a plan to excavate an artificial harbor in Alaska using thermonuclear explosive in what was called Project Chariot. He was a vigorous advocate of Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. Throughout his life, Teller was known both for his scientific ability and his difficult interpersonal relations and volatile personality, and is considered one of the inspirations for the character Dr. Strangelove in the 1964 movie of the same name. ==Early life and work== Ede Teller was born on January 15, 1908, in Budapest, Hungary (then part of Austria-Hungary), into a Jewish family. His parents were Ilona (née Deutsch), a pianist, and Max Teller, an attorney. Despite being raised in a Jewish family, he later on became an agnostic. "Religion was not an issue in my family", he later wrote, "indeed, it was never discussed. My only religious training came because the Minta required that all students take classes in their respective religions. My family celebrated one holiday, the Day of Atonement, when we all fasted. Yet my father said prayers for his parents on Saturdays and on all the Jewish holidays. The idea of God that I absorbed was that it would be wonderful if He existed: We needed Him desperately but had not seen Him in many thousands of years." He developed the ability to speak later than most children but became very interested in numbers, and would calculate large numbers in his head for fun. Teller left Hungary in 1926, partly due to the discriminatory ''numerus clausus'' rule under Miklós Horthy's regime. The political climate and revolutions in Hungary during his youth instilled a lingering animosity for both Communism and Fascism in Teller. When he was a young student, his right foot was severed in a streetcar accident in Munich, requiring him to wear a prosthetic foot, and leaving him with a lifelong limp. Werner Heisenberg said that it was the hardiness of Teller's spirit, rather than stoicism, that allowed him to cope so well with the accident. Teller graduated in chemical engineering at the University of Karlsruhe, and received his Ph.D. in physics under Werner Heisenberg at the University of Leipzig. Teller's dissertation dealt with one of the first accurate quantum mechanical treatments of the hydrogen molecular ion. In 1930 he befriended Russian physicists George Gamow and Lev Landau. Teller's lifelong friendship with a Czech physicist, George Placzek, was also very important for his scientific and philosophical development. It was Placzek who arranged a summer stay in Rome with Enrico Fermi in 1932, thus orienting Teller's scientific career in nuclear physics.〔; see also (【引用サイトリンク】 title=Interview with Edward Teller, part 40. Going to Rome with Placzek to visit Fermi )〕 In 1930, Teller moved to the University of Göttingen, then one of the world's great centers of physics due to the presence of Max Born and James Franck, but after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, Germany became unsafe for Jewish people, and he left through the aid of the International Rescue Committee. He went briefly to England, and moved for a year to Copenhagen, where he worked under Niels Bohr. In February 1934, he married his long-time girlfriend Augusta Maria "Mici" (pronounced "Mitzi") Harkanyi, the sister of a friend.〔 He returned to England in September 1934. Mici had been a student in Pittsburgh, and wanted to return to the United States. Her chance came in 1935, when, thanks to George Gamow, Teller was invited to the United States to become a Professor of Physics at George Washington University, where he worked with Gamow until 1941. At George Washington University in 1937, Teller predicted the Jahn–Teller effect, which distorts molecules in certain situations; this affects the chemical reactions of metals, and in particular the coloration of certain metallic dyes. Teller and Hermann Arthur Jahn analyzed it as a piece of purely mathematical physics. In collaboration with Brunauer and Emmet, Teller also made an important contribution to surface physics and chemistry: the so-called Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) isotherm.〔Journal of the American Chemical Society, 60 (2) , pp. 309–319 (1938).〕 Teller and Mici became naturalized citizens of the United States on March 6, 1941. When World War II began, Teller wanted to contribute to the war effort. On the advice of the well-known Caltech aerodynamicist and fellow Hungarian émigré Theodore von Kármán, Teller collaborated with his friend Hans Bethe in developing a theory of shock-wave propagation. In later years, their explanation of the behavior of the gas behind such a wave proved valuable to scientists who were studying missile re-entry. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「Edward Teller」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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