I never met this hero, but he was sort of an intellectual grandfather to me. One of my most important formative influences was the famous particle physicist Walter Selove, under whom I gratefully studied as a postdoc here at Penn, for five years. His thesis advisor was Edward Teller.
I met him a number of times in the late 80's. Even though he was physically frail, even then, his mind was on afterburner. He had a profound love of the idea of an X-Ray laser. I am not smart enough to know whether it was technologically possible but he seemed to think so and who am I to argue. I remember one afternoon when I carried him over to the OEOB; it was a hot summer Washington DC kind of day; there was no air conditioning in the conference room and he and his cronies were deep into the esoteric world of physics. I drifted off into a dreamlike state although I could still hear the discussion. Spock would have enjoyed the give and take.
He was on my short list, along with Feynman, of "people I most wish I could have met and picked their brains".....