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[–]ScottAlexanderAdam Kadmon 4 points5 points  (1 child)

This is pretty much my research too. I was hopeful you'd found the other twenty one letters, but if you can't find them they're probably not extant.

[–]gwern[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

There's definitely not 21 other letters; Teller says in his 1991 book his alphabet "which is yet to be completed", and he dies in 2003. As far as I can tell, he didn't add on more than 1 or 2 letters, if any at all, after 1957 (since Laura Fermi quotes most of it while implying she heard the rhymes ~1946 and there are already plausible ones for her omissions, and then the longest version I found is 1957, with all subsequent quotes being subsets), so 21 is out of the question.

A pity. I'm sure if he had put a little effort into it at some point he could've come up with a few more letters, since some of them like 'X' or 'Z' or 'N' ought practically to write themselves in an atomic context; but he was a very busy man right up to the end.

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (2 children)

  1. Teller's handwritten poem [on mesons], n.d., may be found in HAB, Folder 12:35. Teller was fond of composing such rhymes; see "Dr. Teller's Atomic Alphabet", reproduced in Anon., "Defense" (1957), 22.

"Defense" is the title of an article which appears in Time magazine, Nov 18, 1957. I did the same kind of research and this was as far as I got. If anyone has as Time subscription, you can read the issue online. If anyone does read it, I'd be interested to know if it contains any more of the poem.

[–]gwern[S] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

/shakes fist at bad citation practices; if you can't provide full text & quotes, at least provide real & verified citations!

"Knowledge is Power", Time. 11/18/1957, Vol. 70 Issue 21, p23. 7p. (italics added):

...To the Cosmos Club. There is still another path for any modern scientist who has acquired a reputation: it leads toward Washington, the affairs of state, national secrets, and the unscientific intricacies of government. In and out of the intellectuals' Cosmos Club on Washington's Massachusetts Avenue hurry physicists, chemists and mathematicians newly arrived to huddle with generals, admirals, high officials of the Federal Government, even, occasionally, the President himself. "There are three kinds of physicists." says AEC Chairman Lewis Strauss, "theoretical, applied and political." Edward Teller is all three.

At the Atomic Energy Commission's Livermore, Calif, fusion laboratory, Teller turns his mind to development of tactical-size, low-fallout thermonuclear weapons. In addition, he serves on the AEC's General Advisory Committee and the Air Force's Scientific Advisory Board, carries on his own strenuous public education campaign in media as far afield from pure science as the This Week Sunday supplement. Main topics: the survival value of underground bomb shelters, the need for continued nuclear-weapons tests, and, above all, the urgency of keeping ahead of Russia in science.

Multiple Monomania. With all this, plus university duties as an associate director of the Radiation Laboratory and a teacher of postgraduate physics. Teller's life shows scant resemblance to the stereotype of the scientist at work, insulated from the clamors and interruptions of the outside world. Even before Teller leaves his garden-girdled house in Berkeley in the morning, his harried secretary usually puts through two or three long-distance calls. After he gets to his office, a train of thought about some theoretical problem in nuclear physics is likely to be interrupted by a query from the Pentagon or a reminder that it is time to leave for the San Francisco airport to catch an outgoing plane. On his trips to the AEC's Livermore lab, 45 miles from Berkeley, Teller dictates letters to his secretary while driving. It is no wonder that Teller has not found time to finish the atomic alphabet (see box) that he started writing for his two youngsters.

Teller's hectic schedule has damaged his health: suffering from ulcerative colitis, he takes daily doses of atropine and phenobarbital, sticks to a doctor-ordered diet, painful for a man who devours food with Hungarian gusto. But a damaged constitution has not damped his crusader's fervor. The late great Nuclear Physicist Enrico Fermi once said to him, with affectionate exasperation: "In my acquaintance, you are the only monomaniac with several manias." Princeton Physicist John Wheeler, who worked on both the A-bomb and the H-bomb, put it more truly. The essence of Teller's character, Wheeler said recently, is that he "cares very much."

A Lost War. Edward Teller's intense concern with the menace of tyranny traces back to his Hungarian childhood. When Teller was born, in 1908, into a Jewish family with culture and money, citizens of gay, well-fed Budapest could believe that the world was solid, dependable. But Austria-Hungary got into World War 1 on the losing side, and the seemingly solid world crumbled. Defeated Hungary lost two-thirds of its prewar territory, and the country's economy collapsed in wild inflation. With the nation's life disrupted and anti-Semitism rampant, Teller's father dinned into his son two grim lessons: 1) he would have to emigrate to some more favorable country when he grew up, and 2) as a member of a disliked minority he would have to excel the average just to stay even.

"All this has great relevance to me," says Teller. "I have seen, in Hungary, at least one society that was once healthy go completely to the dogs. I have seen the consequences of a lost war. I have also seen very many people, with all the evidence before them, refuse to believe what they saw."

The Square. It was easy enough for young Edward to excel the average. In early childhood he showed a gift for mathematics. "One of my earliest memories," he recalls, "is that I was put to bed earlier than I liked and then lay awake in the dark, amusing myself by figuring how many seconds there were in a minute, an hour, a day."

In his high-school days in Budapest, Teller was, as he puts it today, a "square" (pronounced, in his thick accent, "skvare"). Favorite amusements were chess, hiking, poetry and music. Among the subjects of his poems was a chum's brainy, grey-eyed younger sister, Mici (pronounced Mitzi), who shared young Teller's enthusiasm for mathematics and that special Hungarian passion, ping-pong. Eventually they were married. ...

There is no 'box' included in the HTML version; the entry before is "The Week's Pause" (about Eisenhower) and the next entry is "BRIGHT SPECTRUM" (about several other physicists like Seaborg and Feynman but nothing about Teller's alphabet). "Knowledge is Power" turns out to be the only hit in EBSCOhost for Teller AND "atomic alphabet" [TX All Text]. None of the 80 entries for that edition of Time sound relevant or are named "Defense".

So it seems that whoever did the HTML transcription screwed up and forgot to include the box!

Googling doesn't help and a check of Google Books reveals that volume 70 is not available; the Time website does not offer single articles but the cheapest option is a $30/year subscription; Amazon & eBay don't have a copy, and Abebooks has just 1 copy for a cool $15. I am not sure I want to pay $15 just to, likely, confirm that its version of the Atom Alphabet is exactly the same as the Alamogordo version. Does anyone know of any alternatives? I can try /r/scholar first to see if someone can get a scan or better version, at least...

[–]gwern[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

/u/disumbrationist found that one can get the scan through the online time.com archives... but only if you navigate to the issue the exact right way, and has put up the scans of the article: http://imgur.com/a/WlQWR Same version as Alamogordo.

So that settles that.