We will not let everyday politics dominate our lives. It is with great concern that we see science become dominated here and there by politics, and that some states with significant cultural heritages move toward scientific autarchy. This may have a devasting effect on science. There is no such thing as German physics, French mathematics, or English astronomy. These concepts are atrocious creations of national chauvinism. Truth is one and indivisible throughout the world.
(Gustav Rados, president of the Society 1937)
It is the merit of Roland Eötvös to recognize the full importance of active science in the cultural development of a nation. Eötvös initiated regular meetings of mathematicians and physicists at a dinner table in the Carpatia Restaurant, in the vicinity of the Budapest University. They met on Thursday afternoons, in order to learn about the news in science, to find out about the works of each other, and thereby encourage scientific research (1885). (Thursday afternoon has remained the traditional time for physics colloquia for more than a century.) Eötvös said to his colleagues: – We have to raise the flag of science so high that it should be visible beyond our borders. That is our task! – In 1890 an invitation by Eötvös to a lecture on Terrestrial Gravitation and its Measurement was mailed out, but the letter also referred to further goals:
– Gentlemen! We hope that by meeting here we will take the first step towards assembling again and again with a similar purpose and come into closer contact with each other. Respectfully yours sincerely, Baron Roland Eötvös.
Eötvös, the first president of the Society, worded the goals of the Society as follows: – To further the development of science by word of mouth at our meetings, and publish everything that is worth the attention of the experts in a journal: this goal does not seem more than the goal of a self-educating student circle, and still in case we give it the deserved attention, our work will have merit, it will fulfill an important task. If we carry out the task of self-education with dedication and seriousness, it will also have the result that in the future the researchers and developers of science will come from among us. I hereby declare the Mathematical and Physical Society founded. (1891) – After the death of its founder in 1919, the society was named Roland Eötvös Mathematical and Physical Society, or Eötvös Society in the short version.
The Society immediately started publishing its own journal, the Mathematikai és Fizikai Lapok (1891), serving the aims of the Society since then, with the exception of a few years of collapse following the great wars. In 1950 it restarted as Fizikai Szemle, printed now in 2000 copies. (The mathematicians edited another journal.) The monthly Fizikai Szemle is like Physics Today, Physics World or Physikalische Blätter; it has also a certain interplanetary character because it has published regularly the papers of Martians like Zoltan Bay, Nicholas Kurti, John von Neumann, Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner, and many others; it did so even in the cold years of the Iron Curtain. Eugene P. Wigner wrote to Budapest:
To the Editorial Board of the Fizikai Szemle
4 February 1973.
I thank you very much for the greetings of the Editorial Board. I wish warmly the best to you. I would like to use the opportunity for expressing my admiration for the Fizikai Szemle. I hardly remember any issue that I have put off without reading at least one of the papers. I am always happy when a new issue arrives. With
respectful greetings
Wigner Jenõ.
Member Number One of the Society had been Ányos Jedlik (1800–1895), professor at the Budapest University, who invented the dynamo (prior to Siemens), just to supply electric currents stong enough for his lecture demonstrations. Between the two World Wars Eugene Wigner was the owner of the No. 1 membership card. Members of the Society numbered 400 in the early years. Lectures were dominated by mathematics, but, for example, X-rays were already demonstrated on 16 January 1896, shortly after Röntgen's discovery (9th November 1895), even prior to Röntgen's public announcement in Würzburg (23 January 1896). George de Hevesy reported his discoveries (radioactive tracing, discovery of the element Hafnium) within weeks.
Eötvös was a professional experimentalist, a great science politician (president of the Academy, rector of the University, minister of education in certain periods). But he was sticking to the ideal of the "action at a distance" throughout his whole life. He had first class assistants (like Philipp von Lenard, Victor Zemplén), but after a while they left for other universities because they became interested in more up-to-date research.
Viktor Zemplén moved to the Budapest Institute of Technology where he was allowed to lecture on Maxwellian electrodynamics and perform research on shock waves. He was asked to write the chapter on shock waves in the Encyclopedia Physica, forerunner of the Handbuch der Physik.
Philipp von Lenard attended secondary school in Pozsony/Bratislava/Pressburg (then Hungary, now capital of Slovakia). The Nobel Prize winners' biography wrote (Elsevier 1967) – Lenard carried out studies in collaboration with Virgil Klatt, who had been his first physics teacher in his native town, at the Modern College of Pressburg. They studied the so-called self-luminous substances such as calcium-sulphide on which Klatt had been working for some years. Together they found that calcium sulphide, after previous illumination, exerts light in the dark, but only if it contains at least some traces of heavy metals on which the color and the intensity and duration of the luminosity depends; if it is quite pure, it is not luminous. This work with Klatt was the beginning of work in the field which occupied Lenard for the next 18 years. – Lenard quoted this joint 1904 paper also in his Nobel lecture. – The very first paper (1897) of Lenard explained why air near a waterfall is negatively charged while the water is positively charged, through the spraying and bursting of water drops. From here, his road led him to study the photoeffect. Lenard left for Kiel, Germany, then to Heidelberg. He received the 1905 Nobel Prize for his research on electrons and the photoeffect, which Einstein interpreted by using the concept of photons (1905). When he was elected to honorary member of the Hungarian Academy, he thanked in Hungarian.
Eötvös preferred patient observers, who were ready to record the readings of his gravimeter without preconceptions through thousands of hours. The problem was that his diligent assistants became professors after his death, and disliked Maxwell, Planck, or Einstein, discouraged their students to study them in the first two decades of the 20th century. When Arnold Sommerfeld visited Budapest in the 1920s, he turned to Professor Isidor Fröhlich (a protegee of Eötvös), asking: – And Mr. Professor, what do you think about the new theories? – meaning relativity and quantum theory. The professor answered: – I am sure Maxwell has been wrong.
After World War I Szeged – a town rich with blossoming trees – obtained a university. Szeged University carried the torch of progress in the 1920 and 1930s. Here Frederic Riesz planted modern mathematics, Rudolf Ortvay quantum mechanics, Zoltan Bay atomic physics, Albert Szent-Györgyi exact biology, László Kalmár computer science to the fertile Hungarian soil. (Cornelius Lanczos obtained his Ph.D. degree at Professor Rudolf Ortvay.)
Later on, after the departure of Eötvös epigons, Ortvay was called to Budapest University, Bay to the Budapest Institute of Technology. They turned the arms of the clock of physics ahead by two hundred years in the capital city as well. Thanks to them, in the 1930s modern theoretical physics blossomed in Budapest. In 1929 Professor Ortvay (1885–1945), a disciple of Sommerfeld, initiated the Ortvay Colloquium, held on Thursday afternoons. He gave top priority to quantum mechanics, with lecturers like himself and some E.T.-s like Cornelius Lanczos, John von Neumann, Edward Teller, László Tisza, Eugene P. Wigner. At Ortvay's Colloquium also secondary school teachers were present; they were given a chance to talk about their research in electronics, materials science, quantum electrodynamics. Ortvay invited not only the top Hungarians working abroad to speak, but Debye, Dirac, Heisenberg, Planck, Sommerfeld as well. (The 50th birthday celebration of the Dirac equation happened in Budapest with a huge birthday cake given do Dirac, with 50 candles on it.) László Tisza was Ortvay's graduate student, who made his name respected later as the initiator of the two-liquids model of superfluid helium. (His 90th birthday was celebrated after his lecture in the Eötvös Society with a birthday cake and 90 candles on it.) Ortvay's regular correspondence with George de Hevesy, John von Neumann, Eugene P. Wigner, and others was an intellectual bridge keeping Budapest aware of the progress in science even in the cold years to come. They are unique witnesses of the "Hungarian conspiracy" (an expression used by Tuve) and golden documents of the history of physics (published in the Fizikai Szemle). The school of modern theoretical physics survived Ortvay's departure: Karl Novobátzky, protege of Ortvay and inheritor of his cathedra, taught and developed quantum field theory and relativity in spite of the attacks of Marxist hard-liners. Budapest University has become the leading center in basic theory. Paul Gombás, former assistant of Ortvay, created a highly successful theoretical center of atomic and solid state physics at the Budapest Institute of Technology. The present physics competition of university students, organized by the Eötvös Society, is most appropriately named Ortvay Competition.
In the meantime experimental physics radiated from the circle of Károly Tangl (1869–1939), the most progressive student of Eötvös. His disciples, Zoltan Gyulai and Sándor Szalay created a center for crystal physics and nuclear physics at the Debrecen University, in the second largest town of Hubgary, educating a sequence of genuine experimentalists in this theory-dominated country, especially in nuclear physics, solid state physics, and applied physics. It is not by chance that the largest accelerator of Hungary (a cyclotron) operates now in Debrecen.
The Budapest Institute of Technology was the first niche of modern physics in Budapest: Victor Zemplén in the 1910s, Zoltan Bay in the 1940s, Paul Gombás in the 1950s attracted bright students for topics more intimately related to technology. Thanks to Béla Pogány (1887-1943), Rudolf Schmied created a school of spectroscopy and Zoltán Gyulai (1888–1968) developed a school of solid state physics. The Budapest Institute of Technology still dominates in materials science.
Applied physics reached world standards in northern Budapest, where the Tungsram Company was created (1896). The name of this light bulb factory originates from tungsten (wolfram), the heat resistant metal which was patented by Sándor Just and Ferenc Hanaman (1903), as the glowing fiber in light bulbs, instead of Edison's fragile coal fibers. The tungsten (and Tungsram) made electric incandescent lamps long-lasting, so that the light bulb could become an everyday item. (General Electric began using tungsten, but Tungsram went to court and won concerning patent rights.) Michael Polányi and Egon Orowan developed here the theory of crystal dislocations as the carriers of plasticity (1934). Imre Bródy and Michael Polányi cooperated in realizing the most economic incandescent lamp, the krypton bulb (1934), and the mass production of krypton. Zoltan Bay pioneered radio astronomy, Paul Selényi pioneered photocopying. For a short time even Edward Teller worked in Tungsram. (Bródy and Selényi were assistants of Hevesy at Budapest University in 1919.) – Dennis Gabor, Egon Orowan, and Michael Polányi later became members of the Royal Society.
When official institutions were restricted by politics, the Roland Eötvös Mathematical and Physical Society played an important role in enabling scientific life in Hungary. As the motto for this chapter we quoted from the talk given by the president of the Society at the general assembly in 1937. Physics professors tried to connect John von Neumann formally to Hungary, but the proposals were rejected at Szeged University and Budapest Universy, and at the Hungarian Academy as well by the leading representatives sticking to the government's policy. Only the Eötvös Society elected Neumann (a person of Jewish origin and working in America) to an honorary member.
Sub pondere crescit palma. Trees grow under weight. So it can be understood that the most intense periods of the Eötvös Society were the war years, when personal contacts to abroad were cut, and government organizations had other priorities. During World War I Victor Zemplén served as excellent secretary till his death on the Italian front. During World War II this was the merit of Rudolf Ortvay as secretary. This phenomenon of vitality replayed itself later, during the chilly decades of the Cold War.
*
The turmoil following World War I in 1919 resulted in heavy losses for Hungarian culture: George de Hevesy, Theodore von Kármán, Arthur Koestler, Michael Polányi, Leo Szilard were forced to emigrate for fear of revenge from right-extremists (as Michael Curtiz, Alexander Korda, Bela Lugosi did). The losses were continued in the 1920s: Nicholas Kurti, Cornelius Lanczos, John von Neumann, Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner went into exile, due to the spreading anti-Semitism.
The collapse and political turmoil following World War II decapitated Hungarian science once again. Béla Pogány died during the war, Imre Bródy became the victim of the Holocaust, Rudolf Ortvay committed suicide, Rudolf Schmied died in Russian prison camp. The laboratory-creating efforts of Zoltan Bay (at Tungsram), George Békésy (at Budapest University), Albert Szent-Györgyi (at Szeged University) survived World War II, they began enthusiastically rebuilding scientific life in a democratic republic (1946), but were soon forced into exile by the new extreme-left rulers. Soon a new tall was taken by the military suppression of the Hungarian revolt (1956), which made Andrew Grove, Imre Izsak, and George Olah to leave the country. But some of the Martians chose the adventure of staying at home in Hungary.
Fortunately everything was not lost. The Society – like a phoenix – was reborn from its ashes: the Roland Eötvös Physical Society and the János Bolyai Mathematical Society were established in 1949. János Bolyai (1802–1860) was an army officer at a far-eastern garrison in Hungary, and there created the non-Euclidean geometry in 1825. The 21-year old lietunant wrote his father: – Out of nothing I have created a new, different world.) The Eötvös Society launched its monthly Fizikai Szemle (1950) with the optimistic words of Karl Novobátzky:
– Physics develops with enormous speed, this is the most important science of the world, its importance is unsurpassable by anything else. It was not without reason that Einstein called physics the fifth superpower. Experimental physics reaches for the innermost secrets of matter by extremely sophisticated and expensive methods, while theoretical physics explores the possibilities of logically structuring the phenomena of Nature. In Hungary, the impatient desire to catch up with what we missed for centuries turns into action in physics as well.
The Eötvös Society rapidly extended its reach to the whole country, organizing local groups in each part of Hungary, with meetings moving around since 1951. By social means it created a live scientific forum; it built up a result-oriented order of values, quantum tunneling through the Iron Curtain even during the chilliest decades of the Cold War. Its presidents were Paul Gombás (leader of the school in atomic theory), Karl Novobátzky (creator of a school in field theory), Zoltán Gyulay (leader of a school in experimental solid state physics), George Szigeti (former co-worker of Bay in applied physics), George Marx (a student of Novobátzky, initiating particle physics in Budapest), Gyula Csikai (a student of Szalay, developing a neutron lab in Debrecen in close cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency), Norbert Kroó (a materials scientist, encouraging young talents to work in practical research), Dezsõ Kiss (a student of Jánossy, for a while the director general of the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research in Dubna, in the Soviet Union). The Eötvös Society has about 2000 members, and it has become perhaps the most important organizer of international physics conferences in Eastern Europe since the 1960s. (It hosted several conferences of the European Physical Society, International Union for Pure and Applied Physics, International Astronomical Union, International Atomic Energy Agency, UNESCO.) On the lake-side alley in Balatonfüred lime trees planted by Paul A.M. Dirac, Richard Feynman, John C. Harsanyi, Nicholas Kurti, Benoit Mandelbrot, Sir Nevil Mott, Rudolf Mössbauer, George Olah, Bruno Pontecorvo, Jurij V. Prohorov, Edward Teller, and Eugene P. Wigner preserve the memories of their visits and lectures at the Balaton conferences.
Hungary (George Szigeti) has been one of the founding members of the European Physical Society; its past president was Norbert Kroó (Budapest). The International Union for Pure and Applied Physics had Hungarian vice-presidents (Lénard Pál, George Marx). The Academia Europea and the International Astronautical Academy (created by Kármán) have about a dozen Hungarian physicist members, they held general assemblies in also Budapest. The president of the Physics and Technology Division of the Academia Europaea is Norbert Kroó. The Association of Hungarian Physics Students initiated the formation of the International Assotiation of Physics Students; its first president was Patroklos Budai (a student at Eötvös University in Budapest). At the millenium of the Hungarian school Hungary hosted the World Conference of Physics Students (1996).
One important mission of the Eötvös Society had been to keep contact with Hungarians working abroad, on the other side of the Iron Curtain. After John von Neumann the Eötvös Society elected honorary members like Cornelius Lanczos, John G. Kemeny, László Tisza (these were their only acknowledgements from their mother country while they lived), as well as Zoltan Bay, John C. Harsanyi, Nicholas Kurti, Valentine Telegdi, Edward Teller, Eugene P. Wigner (they are also honorary members at the Hungarian Academy). The honor coming from their native country were appreciated.
There are also other prominent honoraries from overseas, from Europe, and from neighboring countries, speaking Hungarian. Their visiting lectures are attended by hundreds of students and physicists, helping to keep the community of the Hungarian speaking physicists together. There are more Hungarian-born physics professors working actively abroad, most of them in the United States, than within Hungary. Our present intensive Western connections are mainly due to their influence. It is a mission of the Eötvös Society to make use of the expertise and knowledge of the Martians, happy and successful far away, in order to strengthen physics at home as well.
We expect that the Hungarian society will gradually grow up to respect its talents. In the 1990s this may become our ticket for re-entrance to the European Community.