The Martians of Science: Five Physicists Who Changed the Twentieth Century

Product Description

If science has the equivalent of a Bloomsbury group, it is the five men born at the turn of the twentieth century in Budapest: Theodore von Kármán, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, and Edward Teller. From Hungary to Germany to the United States, they remained friends and
continued to work together and influence each other throughout their lives. As a result, their work was integral to some of the most important scientific and political developments of the twentieth century.

They were an extraordinary group of talents: Wigner won a Nobel Prize in theoretical physics; Szilard was the first to see that a chain reaction based on neutrons was possible, initiated the Manhattan Project, but left physics to try to restrict nuclear arms; von Neumann could solve difficult
problems in his head and developed the modern computer for more complex problems; von Kármán became the first director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, providing the scientific basis for the U.S. Air Force; and Teller was the father of the hydrogen bomb, whose name is now synonymous with the
controversial “Star Wars” initiative of the 1980s. Each was fiercely opinionated, politically active, and fought against all forms of totalitarianism.

István Hargittai, as a young Hungarian physical chemist, was able to get to know some of these great men in their later years, and the depth of information and human interest in
The Martians of Science is the result of his personal relationships with the subjects, their families, and their
contemporaries.

Review

“Hargittai has carefully read the published literature and weaves useful, analytical patterns that indicate knowledge of scientific comunities while generally approving the relationship of postwar physics, mathematics, and engineerings in teh US with US cold war politics.”–
Physics Today

“What a story! Five brilliant Jewish-Hungarian kids burst out of the great secondary schools of Hungary, learn their physics in Germany, and give their all to America in WWII. And after.
Across the ethnic quilt of Europe and America, the five brilliant “Martians” of this book roam, their weapon in mind –math! István Hargittai, a Jewish-Hungarian like his heroes, tells the remarkable story of five immigrants, of vastly different politics, without whom American science (and the
world) would not be the same.”–
Roald Hoffmann, Nobel laureate, Ithaca, New York

“Surely, ‘hard times provide a good condition for creativity,’ as do supportive culture, societal upheaval, intellectual ferment, and scientific revolution. Imagine then, a group of life stories woven through unique instances of all these factors. István Hargittai traces the turbulent lives of five
uniquely creative scientists who survived, succeeded, and changed the world.”–
Arno Penzias, Nobel laureate, San Francisco

“This is an important story that needs to be told, and Hargittai tells it well.”–
Nature

Charlie Munger of WESCO Financial Corporation recommended this book at the 2007 WESCO Annual Meeting: “It is a hell of a book about five Hungarian physicists driven to the U.S. by Hitler, who contributed much to science here. I can’t recommend it enough.”–Charlie Munger

“fascinating and informative”–
Chemical Heritage

About the Author

István Hargittai is Professor of Chemistry and head of the George A. Olah PhD School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics and research professor at E ötv ös University. He is a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, foreign member of the
Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and member of the Academia Europaea (London). He holds a PhD degree from E ötv ös University, D.Sc. degree from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and honorary doctorates from Moscow State University, the University of North Carolina, and the Russian Academy
of Sciences. He has lectured in some 30 countries and taught at several universities in the United Stat