Writing even in overview of more than a half-century of professional life of a giant of twentieth century science and technology such as Edward Teller is a daunting task. We ask in advance the reader's pardon for passing over quickly or omitting entirely aspects of Teller's life and work which may seem of major significance but which we, due to differences of perspective or knowledge, speak too little or not at all. We refer those interested in greater depth to the excellent biography by Stanley Blumberg and Gwen Owens, The Life and Times of Edward Teller, and we have (with his permission) printed Professor Eugene Wigner's An Appreciation On the 60th Birthday of Edward Teller immediately after this foreword, so that the reader may consider the perspective of one of Teller's most illustrious contemporaries more than two decades ago. Edward Teller was born in Budapest, Hungary on January 15,1908. While his childhood was spent in the twilight of the Victorian age and its abrupt conclusion in the Great War and his youth in its especially turbulent after­ math in central Europe, he doesn't bear visible scars from it.

Inhalt

Foreword.- An Appreciation.- Physics.- On the prevalence of the Gamow-Teller transition.- The light nuclei.- Nuclear giant resonances - a historical review.- Calculating the interaction between atomic nuclei.- Nanosecond matter.- Prospects for further unification.- Relativistic radiation hydrodynamics: Introducing the Landau number.- Inertial confinement fusion.- Planetary Physical Astrophysics.- The computational physics of the global atmosphere.- Stellar X-ray sources.- New Technologies.- Biomicroholography: An emerging technology.- Nuclear explosives as an engineering tool.- Advances in laser isotope separation.- Earthbreak: A review of earth-to-space transportation.- Existing and Potential Weapons.- The development of nuclear explosives.- The branch laboratory at Livermore during the 1950's.- The future of the weapons laboratories.- Properties and applications of intense relativistic electron beams.- Development and application of advanced high energy lasers.- Personal.- Teller's campaign for openness.- National labs and national leadership.- Two Villanelles for Edward on his eightieth birthday.