Hungarian version of this paper
The story of an authentic signature
(In remembrance of the late professor Edward Teller)
Péter Király
(KFKI Research Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics, Budapest)
(For those not familiar with current
political tricks and controversies in Hungary, a brief background is
needed. The universally known physicist Edward Teller, born and
educated in Hungary, deceased recently at an age of 95. This story was
recalled to my mind by the scandal that erupted around a politically
motivated faked posthumous letter, published in the daily newspaper
Népszabadság, that was allegedly written by Teller shortly before his
death. The letter contained a lot of slanderous statements about the
major opposition party in Hungary, known to have been favoured by
Teller. The English version of the typed letter was also published in
facsimile, but without signature. The signature was added separately,
on the facsimile of an old business card. This was obviously a very
poor attempt to authenticate the originality of the letter. As it
turned out, the suspicion was fully justified. He was certainly very
much interested in the scientific, cultural and social life of
post-communist Hungary, and visited his home country many times since
1990. But in the last few months before his death, almost completely
blind, he was by no means in a state to take active part in Hungarian
party politics, and did not write the letter as claimed.)
My story goes back to January 1991, when Edward Teller first visited us
in Budapest, in the research centre Central Research Institute for
Physics (or KFKI by Hungarian abbreviation, dismembered soon after into
its constituent institutes). In the framework of a series of lectures
by leading Hungarian scientists on all aspects of physics, he gave a
talk on high-temperature superconductors. Typical attendance of the
lecture series was 40 to 50, reaching 80 to 100 in exceptional cases.
In the case of Edward Teller's talk about 250 participants crowded the
lecture hall. The wide expectation that we should hear about more than
high-temperature superconductors was fully justified. We also got
acquainted with his views on physics in general and on the world, with
reminiscences on his life and cultural identity. The lecture was given
in excellent Hungarian
As I was in charge of organising the series, I looked to some extent
into the background of each speaker. I was surprised to learn that, in
addition to fundamental discoveries in numerous branches of physics, he
also had some interesting ideas and results in cosmic ray research, a
field with which I had some familiarity. I even found a nice little
poem in which he summarised the common problems of cosmic ray and high
energy physics after the 1949 Echo Lake, USA conference on cosmic rays
(in those early days, before the advent of large accelerators, the two
fields were very closely related). I then made 20 to 30 copies of that
poem, and distributed them before the talk. I did not foresee, although
it was plausible, that some of the participants asked professor Teller
to authenticate the poem by his signature. When I saw how interested he
looked when reading the poem, I also gave him a copy and asked him to
sign mine. I learned then that he practically forgot about the poem,
and had no idea that some copies still existed, and it was by
re-reading it that he recalled its contents and original flavour. "I
sign it, because I did write it once, didn't I?" he said to me, after
some hesitation.
Almost 12 years later, in 2002, his very interesting autobiography was
published in Hungarian
by the Kairosz publishing house in Budapest,
entitled "Huszadik századi utazás tudományban és politikában"
(the English version, publihed in 2001, was
entitled "Memoirs: A twentieth-century journey in science and politics".)
I was surprised to notice
that the little story described above was not forgotten by him. On
pages 269-70 a Hungarian translation of the poem was given, with a
footnote, saying: "I completely forgot about that poem, except for the
first two lines. At one of my visits to Hungary, however, a Hungarian
physicist surprised me by showing me a copy, and then giving it to me".
The Hungarian version, in all probability, was translated by him. It
also contains a few lines that were not included in the published
"second generation version" I found and gave it to him, so he later either
recalled or found the original, pre-publication version of the poem
written in English. Anyway, the English version I was able to find also
excellently reflected his fresh impressions at the dawn of meson
research. And the signed copy is still in my possession.
Professor Teller was an authentic scientist, and in 1991 he
authentically signed his poem on the 1949 state of a major branch of
physics. Now that he is gone, is there any sense in misusing his name
in an unauthenticated political attack that he himself is now unable to
refute? (Fortunately, some of his authentic friends and colleagues did
it for him.) In his poem, he already gave the answer in his own words:
"No, no sense at all.
Or, if there's some sense, it's exceedingly small."
A curiosity: The wikipedia page of Edward
Teller actually contains the Hungarian signature he once gave me!
Edward Teller: The Meson Song (with Edward Teller's
original signature), as published in the Proceedings of the 1949 Echo Lake
Symposium
Edward Teller: Mezondal (Hungarian version in
the autobiography of Dr. Teller)
Letter from Judith Shoolery including the "book version"
of the poem (Judith Shoolery is co-author of Teller's Memoirs, first
published in 2001)