The Martians of Science : five physicists who changed the twentieth century
István Hargittai (Author)
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 Karman, 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 rize in theoretical physics. Szilard was the first to see that a chain reaction based on neutrons was possible, and he initiated the Manhattan Project, but he 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. Teller was the father of the hydrogen bomb, whose name is now synonymous with the controversial Star Wars initiative in the 1980s. Each was fiercly opinionated and poltically active, and they all fought against all forms of totalitarianism. István Hargittai, as a young Hungarian physical chemist, had the opportunity 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. -- from dust jacket
Biography
xxiv, 313 pages, 32 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm
9780195178456, 9780195365566, 0195178459, 0195365569
62084304
Introduction ; 1. Arrival and Departure ; 2. Turning Points in Germany ; 3. Second Transition: to the United States ; 4. To protect and defend: World War II ; 5. To Deter: Cold War ; 6. Being Martian ; Epilogue ; Greatness in Science ; Had They Lived ; Conclusion ; Appendix: Quotable Martians ; Notes ; Select Bibliography ; Annotated Name Index ; Subject Index
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