Nearly 400 years ago, Francis Bacon heralded the dawn of a new era of science and technology, when knowledge and power would be joined in one goal and scientists, rather than priests, would provide authoritative guidance for humanity. Henceforth, according to Bacon, scientists would secure and augment their prestige in society not so much by their dazzling theoretical insights as by the mastery of nature that their practicable science would confer on other men. Bacon predicted that the fruits of the new science would include not only inventions for the relief of human misery but also weapons of immense destructive power.
The Baconian project seemed to reach its zenith in the mid-20th century, when a small group of brilliant theoretical physicists unlocked the secrets of nuclear energy and collaborated on the invention of the nuclear reactor and the atom and hydrogen bombs. Edward Teller, now 94 years old, is among the last survivors of that titanic generation of physicists who permanently altered our world through their work on the Manhattan Project. Teller, who was involved in the race to build the atom bomb from its inception, is now famous-or more often notorious-as "the father of the hydrogen bomb." But Teller was also an early member of that select band of European theoretical physicists who, in the decades between the two world wars, laid the foundations of quantum mechanics, the comprehensive theory of matter and energy on which our understanding of nature now rests.
