Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics

Rating:
Summary: The Best Biography I've Ever Read
Review: "Memoirs", by Dr. Edward Teller, is a straight forward telling of the life of one of the twentieth century's foremost physicists. Dr. Teller describes his exodus from his native Hungary to Germany, Denmark, England and finally the United States. He has worked in the company of some of the great physicists of all time, Fermi, Bohr, Von Neumann and others. He was also instrumental in developing the atomic and hydrogen bombs as well as Los Alamos and Lawrence-Livermore national laboratories.

This book is not an apology for his work in atomic energy, weapons or his testimony regarding Oppenheimer. Dr. Teller goes into great detail to describe his thinking and motives in these areas. Having escaped the Nazi's and communists his right of center views on nuclear deterrence and missile defense are well founded. He discusses being ostracized from the scientific community, views on the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, as well as his political and scientific contributions to among others Nelson Rockefeller and Ronald Reagan.

The book is extensively footnoted; Dr. Teller uses his teaching skills to describe to the reader the concepts being discussed in the body of the work. A basic knowledge of the terms used in physics is helpful but not necessary. The book is exceptionally well written and doesn't get "bogged down" in scientific jargon.

"Memoirs" is a fascinating documentary of the birth and development of nuclear energy in both its destructive and constructive forms. Dr. Teller is straight forward but modest about his role and generous in praise of his many colleagues.

Rating:
Summary: Controversial views on nuclear weapons usage
Review: Edward Teller was the 'father' of the hydrogen bomb, and this autobiography describes his odyssey through the 20th century, from his childhood in Hungary and his insights on the two World Wars to his relationship with scientists and his contributions to the development of atomic weaponry. Chapters present an excellent overview of his sometimes controversial views on nuclear weapons usage.

Rating:
Summary: Thanks to Edward Teller
Review: From the enormous flood of books, the 3Memoirs2 of Edward Teller is unique, awaited so long, and presenting the story of most important science and the application of nuclear energy. This refers to his involvement with cautious and very responsible design of the first nuclear power stations in the world, as well as the story of nuclear weapons. A long number of reflections on life and politics of the just finished twentieth century alone are most valuable to read. The book documents what not all insiders in the fields may have realized before reading, what the media highlighted when nominating the two greatest scientist of the twentieth century: Albert Einstein and Edward Teller.
Teller is one of the last witnesses of the great development of quantum mechanics after 1925. As Ph.D. student and assistant of Werner Heisenberg in Leipzig and in contact with Niels Bohr, Teller presents an authentic summary of the views of Bohr and Heisenberg. Recently the Copenhagen Interpretation received critical modifications (John L. Casti, 3Paradigmas Lost2 1989), and the more mathematical interpretation may to too formal how Heisenberg1s matrix elements as solutions of integral equations correspond to the eigenvalues of Schödinger1s differential equations (Hermann Weyl 1932) with Born1s interpretation of distribution functions (see. Appendix A of H. Hora, Plasmas at High Temperature and Density, S. Roderer, Regensburg, 2000). In this respect, Teller teaches the Bohr-Heisenberg picture with critical but golden explanations. Bohr1s trinity of ideas are: atoms are found in stable and unchanging quantum states, paradoxies are essential for science, contradictions when founded cannot be changed but must be reconciled.
Taking the statistical behavior of radioactivity, quantum physics cannot be interpreted by classical physics though classical physics may be necessary as access. 3Although we cannot change the past, we can know it. But according to the new theory of the atoms, the future is undetermined and therefore truly unknowable. We can change it, but we cannot know it, at least not completely.3 And Teller says generally: 3I believe that the only way to learn from history is to consider what was and what might have been.2
It is unbelievable what ashamed hurdles were in the USA when developing the H-bomb as the only entity to save the world from Stalin1s world war III planned by him for mid 1953 what may have led to a global extension of his communistic totalitarism. Teller1s H-bomb worked before that of the Russians with their long years extensive efforts by the brightest physicists. Teller1s success may have saved the free world.
Nearly all main discoveries how to build the bomb were initiated by Teller. His support was by very few persons only, beginning with President Truman, Senator Brian McMahon, an Admiral 3damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead2 (p. 311), and some members of the GEC of the AEC e.g. Henry De Wolfe Smyth or Lewis Strauss. Teller acknowledges the cooperation with few excellent scientists as John A. Wheeler, John von Neumann, Maria Göppert-Mayer, Freddy de Hoffman etc., and encouragement by Ernest O. Lawrence and very few other prominent colleagues. The obstruction of Teller1s work by a huge majority of influential persons, not only J. Robert Oppenheimer, but very much more persons in key positions responsible for saving the United States from Stalin1s aggression as Carson Mark or Norris Bradbury and many others, is documented.
The intolerable rumors spread by Los Alamos people all the time in favor of Ulam - whose continuous criticism against the H-bomb is documented - are clarified: Teller and Ulam documented in 1949 their simultaneous ideas that compression of the fusion material is the solution. The essential point, however, why the re-absorption of the radiation within the reaction is the key property (p. 313) based on the better exponent for the density dependence, stems from Teller. The question of compression was a key point also for the Russians, discovered only in 1954, and is similar to the compression for the laser fusion with volume ignition (Zeitschr. f. Naturforschung A33, 890 (1978)).
It is well known how scientist are not the best managers, especially where their own scientific ambitions run into a conflict of interests. How this was happening in connection with the crucial strategic developments in the United States is a rather unique documentation by Teller who managed to succeed only very narrowly.
After President Truman ordered the work on the H-bomb 1949, Teller could combine the April/May 1951 nuclear tests on the Enivetok Atoll with his initial concept to put condensed deuterium-tritium in the center of an atomic explosion. The observed exothermic fusion reaction, measured by the 50 meter distant reactions of the fast neutrons producing protons, was the first manmade fusion energy device. Teller1s second H-bomb test in 1952 (developed against the machinations of his superiors at Los Alamos) used then fusion fuel less expensive than deuterium tritium.
Teller1s book gives an elaborated answer whether scientists should work for defense projects. He gave a chamber music performance at UCLA and was greeted 3you would better have become a musician2 by a professor who is known as a notorious enemy of defense research. Similar emotions offended Nobel Laureate Charles Townes as Professor in Berkeley (see his book 3How the Laser Happened2). He was with Wernher von Braun a promoter of President Kennedy1s project of the moon landings. They had the worst opponents from the scientific community. Nobel Laureate Max Born declared 1967 that the moon landing will not be possible before 2000. Now we have to ask after September 11th, where would have been the advanced technologies to fight terrorism without defense research? When Teller initiated to launch SDI by President Reagan, there were so many high profile scientist like Hans Bethe and other Nobel Laureates who ridiculed these developments similar to Teller1s work for the H-bomb. People may have forgotten that SDI finished the cold war, liberated many peoples from communism and is bringing together a democratic Russia with the free world.

Rating:
Summary: The Best Biography I've Ever Read
Review: I am only 12 years old, but believe me when I say that this is one of the best books I've ever read! I had to do a report on a scientist for school and I chose Edward Teller because I had heard of him from my mother and he sounded interesting. Rather than being just another boring book report, I really did enjoy this book. It gave me a lot of information for my report and was not incredibly hard to read. I decided to do a movie for my report and filmed it as if Teller were writing journal entries. I got a 100++ on my project which is what I would give this book...a 100++!

Rating:
Summary: OBFUSCATING CHARMER REVISES ATOMIC HISTORY
Review: I second what Richard Rhodes wrote [author of ''The Making of the Atomic Bomb'' and ''Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb] in summing up his lengthy book review of Edward Teller's "MEMOIR ..." in the New York Times :

" ... Edward Teller approaches the end of a long career as a divisive force in American science and politics,
someone who lent his scientific reputation to dangerous belligerency that cost the nation lives and treasure
but left it shockingly unprepared. About these realities his 'Memoirs' are silent. ... "

Amen!

Nearly ALL Hungarians are charming, especially Edward Teller. As a boy in a proud to be Hungarian, immigrant family, my father once took me along in the late 1940s to visit, in a New Jersey old age home, the 92 year old Dr. Urey. He was the father of Nobel Prize winning, atomic isotope chemist Harold Urey. My Dad made a big thing out of our visit. He had grown up in pre- and post-World War I Hungary with Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, the Gabor sisters and Bela Lugosi (best known to Americans as "Count Dracula"). Dracula and the Gabor sisters aside, my parents proudly asserted that America's atomic bomb came from a team headed by Hungarian scientists: Szilard (the inventor of the atomic chain reaction), Teller (Szilard's underling), Urey's son Harold (who separated isotopes such as those of uranium and deuterium), and the mathematics and theoretical genius von Neumann. But what about Teller?

My grandparents and Teller's parents had neighboring summer houses on Hungary's Lake Balaton. Indeed, Teller's memoirs recall, as a boy, his passionate anti-Communism originated during Hungary's short lived Communist government right after World War I. Communist Hungarian soldiers had urinated on his mother's favorite potted palm tree at the family's summer house on Lake Balaton. Mom's desecrated palm tree was too much for Edward. The heinous act preecipitated Teller's obsession with personally wiping all Communists off the face of the earth. MEMOIR modestly represented his obsession as "conservatism." Possibly, the potted palm led to Teller's carefully cultivated friendship with California's Ronald Reagan; through whom he would eventually impose his scientific fantasy, the Strategic Defense Initiative, on the American people. Teller's penchant for charming obfuscation in MEMOIR is quite often self-pitying and riddled with disinformation. For example, MEMOIR refers to the "fallout" in 1954 from Teller having professionally assassinated J. Robert Oppenheimer (a real genius who got the first atomic bomb to work on schedule).

In MEMOIR, Teller has no sympathy for the Manhattan Project's well liked leader, Oppenheimer, whose career was ruined by him. Rather, he complains of: '' ... the exile I was to undergo at the hands of my fellow physicists, akin to the shunning practiced by some religious groups. . . . I was more miserable than I had ever been before in my entire life.'' What exactly did the man who ratted out his "friend" and much admired scientific colleague expect? Incredibly, in MEMOIR, Teller denies ever having made the statements which nearly destroyed Oppenheimer's life. Now, anyone can read in the F.B.I. files under "Oppenheimer JR," documents, legal depositions and even a letter written in Teller's own hand that was used to remove the security clearance from this one time national hero!!!

Teller is too generous to himself in MEMOIR in seizing credit for the major breakthrough that made the hydrogen bomb possible. The book admits that in January 1951, the physicist Ulam approached Teller with "independently derived" ideas having to do with staging and compression for the hydrogen bomb. But Rhodes points out in DARK SUN that Ulam had visited Bradbury some time BEFORE he came to Teller with his ideas. Rhodes quotes Ulam: ''He [Bradbury] quickly grasped the possibilities, and at once showed great interest in pursuing it.'' But Bradbury didn't want this issue discussed until later. MEMOIR's version of what happened is, Teller had kept silent about this elusive "secret" over which he had been laboring for 10 years. Setting up an historical chronology to grab credit , MEMOIR claims that Norris Bradbury [the then Director of the lab at Los Alamos] prohibited discussion of this important subject until late April 1951; after atomic testing was completed. But, as Rhodes states, it was only AFTER Teller observed those atomic tests in April that he first raised the subject of compression with theoretician von Neumann! Indeed, before he died in1997 at Los Alamo, Carson Mark [who had been the leader of Manhattan Project's Theoretical (T) Division] stated to Rhodes that Teller's claim of being first to make the staging and compression breakthrough simply isn't true. Thus it seems, the paternity of the H-bomb us still under a [mushroom?] cloud.

A more accurate title for Teller's book may be: "Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in Scientific Politics." Teller never won a Nobel Prize for physics (Nobel supported peace while Teller preferred war), but he managed to foist his scientifically fraudulent*(1) Star Wars fantasy first on a hapless Ronald Reagan and then three subsequent presidents. Indeed, Teller's SDI "legacy" is still with us.

Among the more galling assertions is MEMOIR's version of Teller's enduring friendship with Leo Szilard; inventor of the nuclear chain reaction and atomic bombs that it spawned [amazingly, Szilard applied for and was granted a secret patent for this while he was still in England].*(2) As a teenager in the early 1950s, I was glued to the family television screen to witness combat between the two Hungarian giants of physics. Teller and Szilard held a nationally televised debated in New York City. The obsessively anti-Communist Teller insisted on developing bigger and more powerful nuclear weapons. Humanitarian and national security motives caused Szilard to be against them. Dying of leukemia (like so many early atomic scientists), Szilard dragged himself out of a sickbed at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute, a hospital for cancer, to bring this important debate to the American public. He indignantly defended his anti-nuclear position while Teller patronized him. Teller was clearly losing ground in the debate. Trying to neutralize Szilard's persuasive arguments, Teller resorted to charm and began his response with: "But my DEAR friend Szilard ... " The usually polite Szilard stopped Teller in mid sentence with the deflating rebuff: "Look here Teller. I am NOT your dear friend!" For me, there and then, this defined Szilard's "friendship" with Teller.

Once, a Hungarian Nobel Laureate for medicine and physiology, Albert von Szent-Györgyi said to me: "one good way to win a scientific debate is to outlive your opponent!" Teller is a living example of this principle. More to the point, Thomas Jefferson, defending freedom of the press, wrote that American citizens must be allowed to read BOTH the printed truth and also the corresponding lies. Only then could they be depended upon to, inevitably, arrive at the whole truth. In fulfilling the latter condition of Jefferson's paradigm, Teller's MEMOIR may become a valuable work. Indeed, MEMOIR is well written and may deserves five stars for that. Also, the book may even have some historical value. But I cannot bring myself to give it more than three stars because it so painfully tortures the facts.

___________________________________________________________________
*(1) Read TELLER'S WAR by William Lanouette
*(2) Read GENIUS IN THE SHADOWS, a biography by Leo Szilard's brother, Béla Silard [sic], William Lanouette, and [The] Jonas Salk

Rating:
Summary: Captivating memoir
Review: If you have an interest in the history of science
and technology, and in the scientific personalities who
carried out the revolution in physics in the first
half of the 20th century, you will be captivated
by this book.

I picked it up because of my interest in
the history of physics, and because Teller has
held such a central role in the transformation
from small science to Big Science.
Hans Bethe, with whom Teller had some difficulties
during the Manhattan Project, reviewed the book
very positively in Physics Today. I was prepared
to continue to dislike Teller, because of his testimony
in the Oppenheimer hearings and his advocacy of Star
Wars, but he nevertheless quickly won me over.

Teller comes across, in his own account, as a
collegial, cooperative, driven man, who cared
greatly about both his scientific and technical work
and his relations with his colleagues.
After Teller's 1954 testimony at the Oppenheimer
security clearance hearing, Teller was vilified.
Here, he gets to explain why he testified as he
did, and how it was just one of several very
stupid things that he did in his career. (The
stupid thing in this case was to neglect to
explain that his uncertainty about Oppenheimer's
clearance was due to a transcript he was shown
about Oppenheimer's fabricated story
that implicated his friend Chevalier, and
not to Oppenheimer's opposition to development
of the H-bomb, which was widely shared among
physics academics.)

Teller makes an effort to explain the scientific
challenges in his work, such as in the early
days of quantum mechanics when he worked on
molecular dynamics. For example, he explains
Landau's reaction to what is now called the
Jahn-Teller effect (and which Teller says should be
called the "Landau-Jahn-Teller effect"), giving the
basic physical principle involved and the reason for
Landau's initial puzzlement.

Teller played an important role after WW2 in
setting up the engineering principles necessary
to make nuclear reactors safe, and in getting them
implemented.

There are many delightful anecdotes, and even
some poems that Teller wrote. His lifelong friend
Maria Goppert Mayer saved all his letters, and
these provided much material that Teller
used to refresh his memory and select from.

I found the period from 1946 until the establishment
of Livermore Lab particularly interesting and
suspenseful. This book leaves no doubt that
Teller led a fascinating life.

Rating:
Summary: He certainly drives the left over the top.
Review: In the interests of full disclosure, I will note from the first that I am Edward Teller's son-in-law, and something of a fan. I am also a physicist, however, trained in Urbana, and my views on Dr. Teller and the controversies surrounding him antedate my meeting him (and his daughter) by over a decade.

It being the first review of Teller's book on amazon.com, I read F. Sweet's review with some interest. I especially liked the material he 'added' to the book. The story about communist soldiers urinating in Teller's mother's favorite potted palm is a great story, but it isn't in the book. As far as I know it simply isn't true. Neither does Teller recount how his anti-communism began during the brief communist government period in his native Hungary when he was a child.

Indeed, on pages 181-183 of the book, Teller goes into some detail about how his feelings toward communism developed, which was surprising to me for how *late* it occurred. Some quotations from these pages are of interest:

'I had ambivalent feelings about the experiment going on in Russia.' [This about 1930]

'My first indication that something about the communist world was peculiar came in 1931 [at age 23].'

'But I still had not made up my mind. Charles Critchfield, one of our graduate students at George Washington, remembers that as late as 1937 I believed that the experiment in Russia might be the answer to that nation's political and economic problems.'

The seminal events leading to Teller's ultimate rejection of communism, as recounted in the book, were the show trials and executions of the 1930s, the arrest of friend and fellow physicist Lev Landau in Russia in 1938 or 1939, and reading Arthur Koestler's 'Darkness at Noon', published in 1938, which marked that author's profound change of mind from strong pro-communist to equally strong anti-communist. My own political views (libertarian), for example, were formed at a much younger age.

On another topic, Oppenheimer's career was not ruined by Teller. Oppenheimer's security clearance was revoked because of his lying in security interviews during the 1940s, at least according to Dr. Gordon Gray, who chaired the three-member panel and cast the deciding vote. After his security clearance was revoked, Oppenheimer was head of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton for many years, a prestigious post that would be the capstone of anyone's career. Teller spends considerable time discussing the hearing and his testimony and its aftermath, and includes his testimony verbatim in an appendix.

It is true that Oppenheimer had no more influence over US nuclear weapons policy, for which I am very grateful. (...)

The left has (...) never gotten over the discovery that Soviet communism was not a good system, and that Joseph Stalin was not a nice person. Teller came to these conclusions during the late 1930s; the left's hero, Andre Sakharov, came to the same conclusions over 20 years later, after providing the tyrant with the hydrogen bomb. How did the man who provided the hydrogen bomb to the West come to be so reviled by the left, while Stalin's arms designer was beatified? Was he right too early?

Ah, well. Even at 92, Edward Teller can still drive the left completely over the top. The large controversies with which he has been associated over the last 60 years provide plenty of room for reasoned disagreement and principled discussion. People on both sides of the great political issues affecting science (or should that be the great scientific issues affecting politics?) should find this book of interest for the clarity with which it expresses Teller's world view and how it developed.

Mr. Sweet does give credit for the quality of the writing in the book, which is, I suspect, due in no small part to Judy Shoolery. I picked it up and burned through all 569 pages in two days over a weekend, and couldn't put the darned thing down. Teller brings the names of the great men whose work I studied in undergraduate and graduate school to life with stories, amusing anecdotes, and great sorrows as well.

Now, it must be said that I am in fact a biased reviewer, but it is hard to claim that I am any more biased than Mr. Sweet. Readers who wish a more evenhanded treatment of the book than perhaps either one of us has managed would be well-advised to consult the review in the November issue of Physics Today (which is also posted on their website) by Hans Bethe, who was present for many of the events related in the book and can therefore speak from personal knowledge. Bethe also stood on the other side of many of the great controversies from Teller; together they are the last two of the great age of physics, one on either side of a large political divide.

Rating:
Summary: A great Christmas gift for the inquisitive
Review: It is unfortunate that several reviews of this book in leading newspapers have belittled the man who is Edward Teller, as well as his career. Such reviews tell more about the reviewer than they do about Teller's memoirs, which are absolutely fascinating.

Edward Teller had the good fortune to be right where major work in physics was taking place throughout his career. When the hotbed of physics research was in Hungary, he was in Hungary; when it was in Germany, he was in Germany; when it was in England, he was in England, and when it finally moved to America, so did Edward Teller.

A man who is obviously passionate about applying scientific knowledge to solve problems, Teller decided long ago that consequences are for politicians to handle, scientists should only be concerned with furthering mankind's knowledge to the best of their ability.

This, Teller has done in remarkable fashion, and his memoirs allow you to tag along for the ride as he and others perform the mental gymnastics necessary to unlock the secrets of the atom. Far from being a dry technical treatise, however, Teller and Shoolery are surprisingly good at detailing the personalities behind the people, including those of Neils Bohr, J. Robert Oppenheimer (whose first name is Julius, we discover in the book), Enrico Fermi, Lev Landau and others whom most of us have only read about in passing when we were in school. We are also permitted to glimpse more than a few touching moments with his late wife Mici and his son, which reveal the depth of his affection.

He also delves into the political proclivities of his associates, a surprising number of which had socialist and communist tendencies. An appendix gives relevant portions of his testimony during the Congressional investigation into Robert Oppenheimer.

And the book doesn't concentrate on the atom bomb, either. Teller's career covers collaboration on an inherently safe nuclear reactor using hydride fuel (which we still are not yet using for electrical power production in the United States) to work on several ballistic missile defense systems from smart rocks to brilliant pebbles (which, we learn in the book, would protect the entire northern hemisphere -- including Russia -- if deployed). And at the end of the book, Teller gives us his view on where science, people and politics should go from here.

If you have an inquisitive bone in your body, you will thoroughly enjoy this book. All things considered, it is one of the best I've read in a long time. It's a shame that those who differ with Teller's point of view on some issues chose to take it out on his memoirs. This book is fascinating -- but I already said that, didn't I.

Rating:
Summary: Remarkable and Controversial Autobiography
Review: There is no way that everyone would agree as to what events, or even list of events were the most noteworthy of the 20th Century. I do believe that most would agree that the splitting of the atom, the creation of atomic and then thermonuclear weapons would likely have a place on any list. If the controversy surrounding the use of nuclear power to create electricity for public consumption is added, I think the topic has a place assured on any list.

One person among many who was at the center of these topics, events and developments is Dr. Edward Teller. He stands out from the groups he was involved in for many reasons but two are for his longevity in to his 90s' and the participation in the direction of all the associated research his long life has allowed him, and secondly for the controversy he often found himself at the center of. Another book I read not long ago, "Brotherhood of the Bomb", went in to great detail about the very controversial decision to strip Dr. Robert Oppenheimer of his security clearance and the role that Dr. Teller was said to have played in the security clearance not being renewed. In this book of just over 600 pages a large portion is spent on the issue including many pages of transcripts from the actual hearing when Dr. Teller answered questions with Dr. Oppenheimer present.

I don't believe it is fair to judge from a handful of pages culled from over 1,000 whether Dr. Teller alone was the cause of the non-renewal of the security clearance. My impression from what I read was that it was clear there was a strong group that did not want the clearance continued, and to the extent anything negative was said about Dr. Oppenheimer they were going to make the most of it. Unless the pages that are shared intentionally mislead, Dr. Teller repeatedly stated he did not believe Dr. Oppenheimer would intentionally harm the security of The United States. However, if Dr. Teller believed that stating that Dr. Oppenheimer's actions slowed the development of the Hydrogen Bomb development by several years were not going to greatly harm Dr. Oppenheimer, he was either naïve or calculating then, and or now. Only he knows the answer.

There are many large topics this book deals with but one that fascinated me was the perception of Nuclear Power Generation plants for electrical production for civilian use. Unless the reader knows the answer prior to reading the book they may be surprised by what percentage of electricity is still produced by nuclear plants in the USA today. It does not rival France or Japan, but the numbers are still quite large.

In the end perception will carry the day. On average over 50,000 people die every year in The United States in car accidents. An Iranian airliner crashed yesterday killing 307 people, 400,000+ die annually from tobacco use in the USA annually. However, we continue to drive, fly, and about 50,000,000 continue to smoke.

Are nuclear powered plants 100% safe, they are not and the book does not suggest they have been or that they are. The book does discuss the Three Mile Island accident, the incident in England, and the folly that was Chernobyl. Chernobyl must be in a category of its own for the shear scale of stupidity, negligence and intentional harm that was allowed to take place at that plant. To use the former USSR's conduct with nuclear energy as a measure for the rest of the world is absurd.

Despite decades of knowledge that remaining dependent largely on imported oil is shear negligence the reality remains that we as a nation continue to do so. Events are still fluid but we may have a second war in just over 10 years because an individual that controls a nation in the heart of the planet's current oil supply makes us nervous. All the talk of alternative methods of energy have amounted to meaningless practical change, environmental concerns prohibit the pursuit of much domestic oil, so the question remains, what are we going to do?

There are indeed some hybrid cars on the road and there are some that use natural gas, and there is the latest promise of hydrogen fuelled cars that made for a sound byte at the most recent state of the union address. Taken as a whole, their practical impact is nearly meaningless.

Many may not like Dr. Teller's suggestions, and I too would prefer clean production of the energy we need. But the reality is we will change nothing until there is a massive and permanent impact on our economy and or way of life, and then it will be a prolonged painful transition, as opposed to being serious about the issue now and using all talents available to create reliable, sustainable clean energy sources. This man who is in his 90s' has seen decade after decade go by with no change to our consumption of fossil fuels. Those decades are lost, how many more will be?