Edward Teller Centennial Symposium
A unique symposium honoring the 100th anniversary of Edward Teller's birth will be held on May 28.
"Edward Teller was one of the great physicists of the 20th century," notes Steve Libby, of the Physical Sciences directorate. "In recent years, he was recognized for his contributions to national security and science education. We also wanted to do something to highlight his enormous impact on the world of physics."
The symposium has been organized by Libby, together with Karl Van Bibber, also of the Physical Sciences directorate, Director Emeritus Bruce Tarter, and John Holzrichter, president of the Hertz Foundation, and is sponsored by LLNL, the University of California, the Hertz Foundation, and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
The early decades of the 20th century saw a revolution in man’s understanding of the physical universe. The quantum revolution of the 1920s and the physics breakthroughs that followed are associated with a pantheon of extraordinary minds, many of whom were Teller’s mentors and colleagues, including Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Lev Landau, George Gamov, Leo Szilard, Hans Bethe, Eugene Wigner, Enrico Fermi, Maria Mayer, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and E. O. Lawrence.
Teller began his career as a student under Heisenberg at the University of Leipzig. In the 1930s at Gottingen, Copenhagen, London, and then Washington, he helped lay the foundation of the quantum understanding of molecules. Later he made major contributions to nuclear, statistical, condensed matter, and plasma physics. Turning to applied work at Los Alamos, Teller assisted the development of the first atomic bomb. At the height of the Cold War, he led the drive to develop the hydrogen bomb and worked with Lawrence to establish the Livermore Laboratory for thermonuclear research.
"His work in physics included some of the most fundamental insights into the quantum behaviors of molecules and their spectra, nuclei, surfaces, solid state and spin systems, and plasmas," noted Van Bibber. "The symposium will focus on Teller’s science and its ramifications on physics today."
An impressive list of speakers has been assembled, including Sig Hecker, co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory; Janos Kirz, senior advisor at the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, research professor at Stony Brook University, and Teller’s nephew; Steven Rose, professor of physics at Imperial College, London, and Oxford University; Nathaniel Fisch, professor of physics at Princeton University; Wick Haxton, professor of physics at the University of Washington; Malvin Kalos, physicist at LLNL; and Robert Littlejohn, professor of physics at UC Berkeley.
The symposium will be held at the new Bankhead Theater in downtown Livermore. Register online . The registration deadline is May 9.
Lab’s community newsletter featured in this week’s The Independent
For the first time, all Livermore residents received the Tri-Valley version of Discover LLNL, the Lab’s community newsletter, as an insert in their weekly The Independent newspaper. The April 17 issue of The Independent features the Spring 2008 publication of Discover LLNL. The next insertion of Discover LLNL in The Independent for Livermore is planned for fall.
