Born in Budapest, Hungary, then part of the crumbling Austro-Hungarian Empire, Teller was born into a middle-class Jewish family. He studied briefly at the University of Budapest (1925) before entering the Institute of Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany, in January 1926 to study chemical engineering. In 1928 he went on to the University of Munich to study physics. That summer his right foot was severed in a streetcar accident, and after several months of convalescence at home in Budapest, he enrolled at the University of Leipzig later that year. There Teller studied with physicist Werner Heisenberg and became increasingly aware of the growing threat of Nazism. After earning his Ph.D. in 1930, Teller accepted an assistantship for postgraduate work in physics at the University of Gottingen, a sign of his growing reputation among German physicists. Yet with the rise of Adolf Hitler in 1933, Teller realized that, as a...