Timelines of History

[thepennyking]

Coming from outer space

There is only one single factual piece of evidence about the descent from planet Mars: there is a mount named Von Kármán Crater on the Red Planet. Hungarians left more traces on the Moon: a huge ring in the southern part of the far side of the Moon has also been named Von Kármán Crater, honoring the pioneer of supersonic flight. East of it is the tiny crater honoring Imre Izsák, the Hungarian-American expert of celestial mechanics of the Space Age (1929-1965). In the North-West, near the lunar Terminator Line, halfway between H.G. Wells and F. Joliot is the great Szilard Crater of 122 km in diameter. East of it astronauts may find the Von Neumann Crater. Further l9th century Hungarians, who did not cross the Ocean, also deserved place on the Lunar Map: in the southern part of the far side are János Bolyai (pioneer of non-Euclidean geometry, 1802-1880); a bit east of it is Roland Eötvös. A tiny crater represents Gyula Fényi, the Jesuit solar astronomer (1845-1927), another one the Austro-Hungarian Nobel laureate, Richard Zsigmondy. But there is a Martian who proved that the craters on the Moon are not products of lunar volcanism but had been created by impacts of meteors from outside: Egon Orowan, while working on plasticity and fractures in solids, studied high resolution photographs brought back by the Apollo missions.7 (There is indeed an asteroid named Teller orbiting around the Sun, discovered by E.F. Helin in 1989.)

Speaking an alien tongue

An obvious explanation of the myth of the Martians may be their strange language: its grammar and vocabulary are quite distinct from those of the Indo-European languages. Kármán and Bárány proudly accented the á in their names at all times, in spite of the opposition of computerized word processors. (The Báránys did so through generations.) When polyglott Valentine Telegdi decided to learn Japanese, he rushed to Budapest to buy a Japanese language book written in Hungarian, because Hungarian grammar is similar to Japanese, while for an English author it is difficult to explain how Japanese think and speak. (Chinese, Japanese, Koreans put family name first, given name as last; in Europe only the Hungarian language follows this rule.)

According to myth, at a top secret meeting of the Manhattan Project General Groves left for the gents' room. Szilard then said: - Perhaps we may now continue in Hungarian! - Hungarian emigrees enjoyed speaking their mother tongue whenever a chance offered itself. This has made them look suspicious. Los Alamos was a place of top security. General Groves was annoyed that Neumann and Wigner had frequent telephone conversations in Hungarian. [Teller, talk in Budapest 1991.] The "thick Hungarian accent" was often heard even in the corridors of the Pentagon. (The Lugosi accent made the alien power of Dracula, the count from the faraway Transylvania even more realistic. )

This explanation of the myth, however, is certainly not sufficient. Let us quote now George Békésy:

- If a person traveling outside Hungary is recognized as a Hungarian due to his accent, something which - beyond a certain age - is impossible to drop, the question is asked almost in every case: "How is it possible that a country as small as Hungary has given the world so many internationally renown scientists?" There are Hungarians who have tried to give an answer. For my part: I cannot find an answer, but I would mention one thing. When I lived in Switzerland, everything was peaceful, quiet and secure; we had no problems earning a living. In Hungary, life was different, and we all were involved in an ongoing struggle for almost everything which we wanted, although this struggle never caused anybody's perdition. Sometimes we won; sometimes we lost; but we always survived. It did not bring an end to things, not in my case anyway. People need such challenges, and these have existed throughout the history of Hungary.


Crossroads in space-time

It is a fact of history that the great figures of human culture are not distributed evenly in space and time. They concentrated, for example, in democratic Athens (Aristotle and Sophocles), while the city was fighting against Persian invasions; in renaissance Florence (Michelangelo and Galileo), in a city struggling with the supremacy of the Pope; at the dawn of the English industrial revolution (Shakespeare and Newton), while fighting the Spanish Armada. Quiet periods require only social adjustment. Under a changing climate, however, old schemes no longer work, such conditions encourage creative individuals. If a very different final truth is offered each month, young people learn critical thinking, and become more interested in facts than in axioms. During the recent political turmoil a joke circulated: - What is the most unpredictable thing today in Hungary? The past! - Psychology teaches us that an impact-rich environment cultivates talent. To support this view, let's quote one of the strangest Martians, Arthur Koestler8:

- When Tom Corbett, Space Cadett, behaves on the Third Planet of Orion exactly in the same way as he does in a drugstore in Minnesota, one is tempted to ask him: "Was your journey really necessary?"

There may be historical reasons for this alien coherence of the Hungarians: - Hungary was usually in turmoil; a situation attributable mainly to an accident of geography.9 - As Kati Marton (Mrs Holbrook), who left Hungary as a child in 1957, said,l0 - My parents had too much history. - My thesis is that Hungary (together with her Central-European neighbors) has been at the crossroads of history, where the routes from Rome (Catholicism), Germany (Reformation), Russia (Eastern Orthodox Christianity), Osman Empire (Islam) met each other, presenting alternatives and igniting conflicts. Armies from East and West were marching on the roads through centuries. We have learned agriculture from the Slavs, the Renaissance arrived from Italy, and industry came from Germany. Through one and a half centuries the armies of the Osman Empire took everything what they could from the Hungarian peasants - but pigs; this is why pork is the favorite meat of the Hungarians till today. Grapes were introduced by the veterans of the Roman legions, in oder to make wine. Beer-brewing came from Germany. The Russians have shown how to distill vodka. And the Turks introduced the strong black coffee, a present national drink of the Hungarians. So much about the first Hungarian millenium.

A hundred years ago (when the Martian heroes of this book were born), a German-speaking Emperor-King ruled Hungary, supported by feudal landlords. But the industrial revolution was already in full swing, having brought the parliamentary system, compulsory education (1868) - and unsolved social contradictions. In 1896 politicians in Parliament spoke of the glory of the past thousand years of Hungarian history, but the world exposition, organized in Budapest to honor the millenium, presented new physical inventions and the first underground metro system on the continent was already operational in Budapest (second only to London).

As the 20th century arrived, the Austro-Hungarian Empire started playing the superpower: Turkey was expelled from most of the Balkan Peninsula. Austria-Hungary occupied Bosnia (1908), pushing Serbia toward an alliance with Russia. After a Serbian nationalist murdered the Habsburg crown-prince in Sarajevo (1914), war was declared against Serbia. Russia rushed to help the Serbs, Germany responded by attacking Russia, France and England declared war against Germany. Thus World War I was started, and was lost. After the military collapse Michael Károlyi, the liberal Count rose against the Austrian emperor and created a pro-Western democratic Hungarian Republic (31 October 1918). But with the encouragement of the Western Powers the neighboring countries attacked Hungary. Károlyi resigned, and a communist government organized resistance - looking for help from Moscow (21 March 1919). Their defense efforts could not last for long: Budapest was invaded by foreign troops (July 1919). Finally a group of Hungarian army officers assembled and took power (November 1919), made the country formally a kingdom again (but the military rulers expelled the Habsburg king trying to return). The rightist military rule took revenge. A wave of emigration began.

Almost all the Martians attended university and began their careers in Germany, where and when quantum mechanics had been born. This does not contradict but confirms our thesis that conflicts cultivate creativity. The 1920s were the decade of the Weimar Republic, which was full of psychological conflicts: the democracy was overshadowed by the lost World War ("Dolchstoss von hinten" ), the dream of a new German Empire (das Dritte Reich), the trilemma of liberalism-communism-nazism. This fruitful period of the coexistence of contradicting ideologies lasted there over ten years, before terminating in the tragedies of the economic crisis, dictatorship, and war.

A similar critical but creative period of accelerating history was experienced in Petrograd in the early 1920s, after the fall of the Czar and before the rise of Stalin, resulting in an explosion of creativity. In Hungary, however, all these revolutions and counter-revolutions happened in a mere twelve months!

http://www.mek.iif.hu/kiallit/tudtor/tudos1/martians.html