In the late '70s I had the opportunity to sit in on a lecture by Dr. Teller while visiting Stanford for a course. He roamed across many topics, but one in particular stands out. America had just been through the 'oil crisis' with long lines at gas stations in late 1973 and 1974 because of the Arab oil embargo. At the time of Teller's lecture we were in the midst of another oil crisis.
Teller proclaimed that there was plenty of oil that had not yet been discovered. He opined that we would have to drill deeper and in more exotic places to find it and because of this difficulty, it would be more costly, but plenty was there and we would eventually get it as the technology matured. As it turns out, he was absolutely correct.
While Teller is often vilified, he was definitely a genius and up to that point I had not been in the presence of one, although I had once seen Hans Bethe while at Cornell in a physics class.
No comments:
Post a Comment