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To: MikalM
I got to hear Dr. Teller twice and meet him very briefly back in the late 80's. A really entertaining personality.

The one thing I remember is someone asked him who he thought the greatest physicist of all time was and he named some guy I have never heard of. I do recall he was Hungarian tho, just like Teller.

86 posted on 09/10/2003 1:50:59 PM PDT by yarddog
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To: yarddog
The one thing I remember is someone asked him who he thought the greatest physicist of all time was and he named some guy I have never heard of. I do recall he was Hungarian tho, just like Teller.

It was probably Teller's closest friend, Eugene Wigner, who died some seven or eight years ago. Although not a household name, Wigner was the first to apply gauge theory to the study of nuclear reactions, which helped lead directly to the Standard Model. He shared the Nobel Prize with Teller's old student Goeppert-Mayer.

Incidentally, Wigner is best known for an idea which was later DISproved, the notion of perfect particle symmetry, or parity. This notion was, ironically, disproved by Chen Ning Yang (In collaboration with Tsung Dau Lee), another of Teller's students. Yang and Lee would also win Nobel Prizes for their effort.

105 posted on 09/10/2003 9:44:13 PM PDT by RightWingAtheist
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