edward teller. edward took me under his wing. he arranged for me to get a scholarship to harvard.xactly what i was doing. i didn't have to is going to him when antimatter was, what an accelerator was, what a bitter try was. he knew immediately. he arranged for me for to get a scholarship so that started my life as a physicist. brian: how did you meet him? michio: he came to mexico -- our for the national science fair. he was in the habit of recruiting young scientist. he went to the national science fair. i was actually on television with him. this was in 1963 in albuquerque as a national science fair. when i graduated from harvard he interviewed me for a graduate fellowship but at that point he was very clear. he said i am looking for people who want to design hydrogen warheads. your physics will be very valuable designing new and better hydrogen warheads. he offered me a scholarship. he said little more, you name -- he said loss alamo's, livermore you name it, we can , arrange for you to work there. but my interests began to veer off in the direction of when i was a child, wonde

that edward teller founded. i was a beneficiary of that.hen my phd program, there was money for the national science foundation. so luckily even though , struggling artists have a hard time scraping together the next meal, in science there is funding, the national science foundation, the department of energy will fund enterprising young phd students. that i think is a good thing. there is a brain drain into the united states because there is funding, both private silicon valley billionaires will sponsor startups and there is a national science foundation in the department of energy for more speculative and cutting edge kinds of research. there is a brain drain into the united states at the present time. brian: back to your 10-year-old example -- do you have children? michio: yes, two. brian: what kind of work are they in? michio: the older daughter is a brain doctor. she is a neurologist. actually a professor now. at boston university. the other one followed a different road. she is a french pastry cook. she went to an exclusive school wher

as far back as 1959, edward teller, the emintent scientist, was -- the eminent scientist was warning folks in the petroleum industry. he said in a speech first of all, niece energy resources will run short as we use more and more of the fossil fuels. sure enough there's more in the ground than anyone thought in 1959. then he said, second, that it turns out that carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels has a big problem. you can look through it and you can't smell it but it turns out it traps heat, and he proceeded to say that this would be a big problem because it would melt ice in the world and raise the sea levels and that would flood our cities. he didn't have all the science that had been generated since 1959, but he had a basic understanding of the physics of the problem. what did we see? we have seen from that time until now a 25% increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and that's a big deal. and so we've seen year after year be hotter and hotter. in fact 2050 -- 2015, 2016, 2017 with the three hottest years ever recorded, and yet these individuals stand up and say

i think about how back in 1959, edward teller was addressing the 100-year anniversary of the oil industry. he had been invited to speak as an eminent scientist. he said many good things about the role that burning fossil fuels could do to amplify the energy in america, but he also said there is two challenges that this industry has. the first challenge is that there is a limited amount of fossil fuels in the ground and someday we'll run up against that shortfall and we'll have to switch to other forms of energy. now, it turned out that there was a lot more fossil fuels around the planet than we ever anticipated in 1959. the second point he said is this may not seem like a pollutant because you can't smell it, this carbon dioxide, you can't see it, but it has this intriguing and problematic characteristic in that carbon dioxide traps heat. it traps infrared energy. and as a consequence, it's going to cause great disturbances as it builds up in the atmosphere. we specifically talked about its effect on the poles in raising temperatures, melting ice, and raising sea levels. well, we know tod