Professor David Wolfe
The Martians
Summary
Professor David Wolfe shares the story of two Hungarian Jewish physicists, Leo Szilard (1898–1964) and Edward Teller (1908–2003), known as the Martians due to their exceptional intelligence. They both played crucial roles in the development and control of nuclear weapons during and after World War II, with Szilard working to prevent their misuse and Teller contributing to their proliferation. The lecture explores their contrasting paths and the broader context of the brilliant scientists involved in shaping the nuclear age.
Professor David Wolfe
David Wolfe received a PhD in physics from the University of Pennsylvania. He has taught and researched at the Universities of Chicago, Washington, New Mexico, and Cape Town. His research was in high-energy experimental physics, and he worked at most of the major accelerator centers in the world, including Brookhaven, Fermilab, and CERN. In the 1990s he was involved in work on nuclear non-proliferation with former Soviet Union countries. For many years he has been involved with the UK Institute of Physics (IOP) and the South African Institute of Physics (SAIP). They run training programs for secondary school teachers in Soweto, Eastern Cape, Kwa-Zulu Natal, and Limpopo and plan to expand this program through all nine provinces.
That is absolutely true. They invented it. It has not, I understand, ever actually been commercially produced, but it was a very good refrigerator.
Both these things are true. The first one used only a small percentage of the fissile material, because before all of the nuclei could fission, it blew up. The first bomb was used in Hiroshima and it killed 75,000 people. The second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, and it was very cloudy. Apparently there was a small break in the clouds that allowed the B29 to drop its weapons, and it was about a mile off of target. It did not kill the same number of people.