János Kirz

Major Players

István Hargittai: The Martians of Science-Five Physicists Who Changed the Twentieth Century. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008, 368 pp.

 

...

Rather than produce a collection of essays devoted to the lives of individuals, Hargittai chose to compare and contrast them at every period of their lives. This device makes for lively, interesting reading. It is also appropriate because the five were friends (some close, others less so) in spite of their divergent views on life and politics. In a particularly well-written chapter, Hargittai traces the historical and cultural context of their origins as upper middle-class Jews growing up in the golden age of Budapest in the period before the First World War. The author, though of a later generation, is of the same origin, and sets the stage with care and with the warm glow that I recall in the descriptions given by my own grandparents when they were talking about "the good old days". He goes on to describe how the turmoil of the First World War, the short-lived and brutal 1919 Communist revolution of Béla Kun and the subsequent White Terror under Miklós Horthy shaped the lives and political awakening of his subjects. He points out that Kun and many of his gang were Jews, and that this strengthened the rabid government-sanctioned anti-Semitism that followed. While Teller's family suffered during the Kun regime, we learn from Hargittai that von Karman's idealism led him to take a role in the Kun government, with responsibility to modernise higher education, before his own disillusionment with the dictatorship of the proletariat.
These events, along with the attraction of the great scientific and cultural opportunities of the Weimar Republic, led the Martians to move to Germany. They arrived during the golden age of physics, the time when quantum mechanics and its applications to atomic and molecular physics were developing rapidly. They all found themselves in the company of the scientific leaders of the day, including Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr and Planck, and were welcome due to their remarkable gifts, insight and productivity.
Hargittai describes Szilard as the Martian with the greatest ability to size up the political landscape of the time, with von Karman, the oldest of the group, at the other extreme. And as the Nazis came to power in Germany, it was Szilard whom many saw as selfish for patenting his ideas, who devoted all his energies and limited resources to rescue academics from harm's way. He was a visionary who recognized that atomic energy could be harnessed for military uses. He and all of the Martians, by varying routes, ended up in the United States in the 1930's. By this time, they were all leading scientists, recruited by top American universities.
Von Karman's remarkable contributions were in the area of aerodynamics, the design of airplanes, wind tunnels and rockets. His influence on the US Air Force was profound, but he was not interested in becoming a public figure.
After the discovery of fission at the beginning of 1939, Szilard worried that Nazi Germany might take the lead in building an atomic bomb. He was the most active in getting the US government to get going on research toward exploiting atomic energy for military purposes. He enlisted his friends, Wigner and Teller, to help in this endeavour. Hargittai's description of these well-known events during the 1939-1941 period reads like a detective story. Szilard also attempted to prevent the use of atomic bombs on Japan at the end of the Second World War.
Von Neumann may have been the most highly regarded among the Martians in the scientific community because of his seminal papers both in mathematics and in theoretical physics. He made major contributions to the war effort of the US Navy before joining the team working on the atomic bomb when it was already in full swing. The conceptual development of digital computers is probably his bestknown achievement.
Wigner, the only Nobel laureate of the group, made fundamental contributions to theoretical physics, especially in elucidating the important role of symmetry. He participated in the Manhattan Project and made major contributions to nuclear reactor design.
Teller, who would have been 100 years old on January 15, 2008, and who is best known for his role in the design of the hydrogen bomb, also made a name for himself in the world of science through his important contributions to chemical and nuclear physics.
As four of the five Martians took part in the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb, Hargittai considers at length the attitudes of his principal characters regarding this matter.
Possibly the best chapter in the book is the one on the Cold War. Hargittai takes us through the lives and struggles of the Martians, now major players in US weapons research, from 1945 until the end of their lives. They all understood the dangers that Stalin's ruthless thirst for power represented better than most of their contemporaries. Their reactions varied considerably, however, with Szilard working on communication with scientists across the Iron Curtain,¹ Wigner advocating Civil Defence, while the other three invested their energies in making sure that the US did not lose the arms race. Hargittai's account of the development of the hydrogen bomb and Teller's major controversial role in it is fascinating and as carefully researched as possible in view of the fact that many of the documents are still classified.
It was during this period that four of the Martians died. Teller, the last survivor, continued to play a critical role in defence matters, especially Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, known popularly as Star Wars. His many critics attacked the programme as a reckless adventure and total waste of money. He saw it as one factor that led to the free world's triumph in the Cold War.
One of the last chapters is devoted to contrasting two of the Martians with notable contemporaries: Szilard with the great Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, and Teller with J. Robert Oppenheimer. In this way, Hargittai provides the background to the famous "Oppenheimer case", where Teller's testimony was interpreted by his colleagues in the scientific community as a betrayal of his former boss. The author brings the complex events to life in a way that conveys the context as well as the actual events.
The book ends with an Epilogue that is designed to complete the picture. Here one gets the impression that it is the scientist rather than the gifted writer that is in control. It is only here that we learn about von Neumann's seminal contributions to game theory. The description is complete and correct, but not inspired.
The photographs are very interesting, but not of high quality, and the captions do not always identify those who are of interest, but this is only a minor flaw.
If these five scientists had ordinary lives, ordinary habits, ordinary values, the term Martian would not apply. It is clear from the narrative that the Martians were fully devoted to what they saw as their mission. This mission was mostly science, but when they perceived a threat to freedom, to human values, they devoted their full energies to addressing that threat as they saw it (and they in no way saw it the same way). Mission came first, private life and family had to take a back seat. Does this mean that they were humourless, boring characters? Not so. But they did not shy away from being unconventional eccentrics, with the possible exception of von Neumann and von Karman for whom the enjoyment of life was probably more important than to the others.²
Overall, the book succeeds spectacularly because the author, a renowned professor of physical chemistry, has himself lived a life in science, has had a second career interviewing the giants of science,³ and has a gift for writing about science and scientists.⁴ He also happens to be Hungarian, and of the same cultural roots as the subjects of his book.⁵ His careful scholarship is documented by extensive notes at the end of the volume. He is fascinated by the Martians, but this fascination does not blind him to their faults, limitations and peculiarities.

 

¹ As mentioned in the book, Teller's sister and mother could join him in the US in 1959, which was made possible by Szilard's influence with the Soviet authorities.

² Much as children go to music lessons, sports or other extracurricular activities these days, they learned ballroom dancing in the first decades of the 20th century. Von Neumann was in the same dance class as my mother.

³ István Hargittai and Magdolna Hargittai: Candid Science: Conversations With Famous Scientists, London, Imperial College Press, 2005 (6 volumes).

⁴ István Hargittai: The Road to Stockholm: Nobel Prizes, Science, and Scientists. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002.

⁵ István Hargittai: Our Lives: Encounters Of A Scientist, Budapest, Akadémiai, 2004.

 

János Kirz
a physicist and Teller's nephew, met two of the other Martians as well. He escaped from Hungary in 1956 on foot at night, but has been back frequently since 1989. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Stony Brook University (New York), and Scientific Advisor at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. He specialises in X-ray optics and microscopy.