(7 of 8)
In November 1952, history's first thermonuclear explosion wiped the South Pacific islet of Elugelab off the face of the earth. What exploded was not a bomb, but an unwieldly device made monstrous by the refrigerating equipment needed to keep heavy hydrogen liquified. History's first real H-bomb (using lithium instead of heavy hydrogen) was exploded by Russia in August 1953. Fortunately for the U.S., Edward Teller had by then come up with the missing idea (still top-secret) that the U.S. needed to make a practical H-bomb. It was an idea so ingenious, says a U.S. physicist who is no friend of Teller's, that "only one or two men in the world could have thought of it." (The other was a Russian.)
The Monster. One of Teller's sturdiest allies in the 1949 H-bomb struggle was the University of California's Nobel-Prizewinning (1939) Physicist Ernest Orlando Lawrence, inventor of the cyclotron and head of the Radiation Laboratory. In 1953 Lawrence invited Teller to join the university's topnotch physics faculty.
For Teller, the move to California meant an opportunity to work in the famed Rad Lab, whose star performer, the 6 billion electron-volt Bevatron, was then the world's most powerful atom-smasher. For Housewife Mici, the move brought fulfillment of a long-cherished dream: a living room big enough to hold both family and "the monster," as she calls her husband's piano, an 1879 Steinway that he bought in Manhattan in 1941. Teller (favorites: Bach. Beethoven, Mozart) calls the piano "my only possession that I really like," but Mici's voice takes on a steely tone when she recalls the logistics of getting "the monster" hauled back and forth across the U.S.
What with the big living room, the
Bevatron and Berkeley's balmy climate, life in California should have proved pleasant. But Edward Teller is no man to pursue either happiness or pure science in the midst of the cold war. Nagged by new signs that Russia was catching up in the science race, he set out on a crusade to warn the U.S. to run faster.
What Makes Grass Green. What does the U.S. have to do to run faster? On two basic points, just about all U.S. scientists agree: the U.S. needs 1) more basic research, and 2) more and better science education in the high schools.
At present, the U.S. channels about $450 million a year, only one-tenth of 1% of its income, into basic scientific research—the kind that former Defense Secretary Charlie Wilson scornfully dismissed as finding out "what makes grass green and fried potatoes brown." Among scientists, Wilson's remark is quoted again and again as an example of the nonscienlist's obtuseness where the value of pure research is concerned. Basic research delivers no immediate payoff in hardware, but it feeds the technology of years to come. The A-bomb story goes back to Albert Einstein's idea, published in 1905, that energy is bound up in every scrap of matter. The H-bomb evolved out of studies of the stars.