Hungarian/Martian/Manhattan theory

[cambraceres]

Does anyone have any ideas about how such an accident could occur at the best possible time?

I don't believe the martian bit, but c'mon, talent should be way more dispersed no?

I'm talking about the arrival of Von Neumann, Wigner, Szilard, etc.

It seems silly but it is past strange that a linguistic and cultural island could so quickly produce such intrepid genius

[Darryl_P]

If you regard international Jewry as a single organism and consider that Hungary was exceptionally Jew-friendly from 1867 to WWI, then the fact that some great Jewish minds came from Hungary should not seem like such an accident, especially considering that the greater your mind, the more likely you will be to emigrate before trouble strikes.

[cambraceres]

I really didn't think of it as a Jewish question, that's interesting. I like your answer but still cannot reconcile the extreme progress made by this exceedingly small facet of society.

The Germans had much to help them in their scientific endeavors, and therefore it seems reasonable for them to have such overarching skill. The Hungarians in my mind defy explanation.

Cambraceres

[Darryl_P]

I live in Hungary and I can tell you that the consensus among the religious right here (10-60% of the population, depending on where you draw the line) is that being Hungarian does not depend on what passport you are holding, but rather on your ancestry going back tens of generations. According to this defintion, none of those three great minds count as Hungarian, because their families were only present here for 2 or 3 generations before them. In fact, going down their family trees they moved around quite a lot (as most Jews have, mostly because of persecution), so when examining it on an extended timeline, there's really no better category than "Jewish" to place them in, since that was the common denominator over that time period.

The correlation between being Jewish and having high intelligence should not come as a surprise because of various studies which assign as much as 14 IQ points on average as the difference between Ashkenazi Jews (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi) and the rest of the world's population.

[Fly]

It has nothing to do with Hungarians and everything to do with Jews.

[chrisnice]

How did Western PA produce so many great NFL quaterbacks. Dan Marino, joe Montana, Johnny Unitas, Jim Kelly and Joe Namath.

[Borodog]

Hans-Hermann Hoppe explains it in passing in the introduction to Democracy: The God that Failed (http://www.mises.org/hoppeintro.asp) (he mentions specifically Austria, but recall that Austria and Hungary were united in the Dual Monarchy):

[ QUOTE ]
Meanwhile, Habsburg-Austria and the proto-typical pre-democratic Austrian experience assumed no more than historical interest. To be sure, it was not that Austria had not achieved any recognition. Even democratic intellectuals and artists from any field of intellectual and cultural endeavor could not ignore the enormous level of productivity of Austro-Hungarian and in particular Viennese culture. Indeed, the list of great names associated with late nineteenth and early twentieth century Vienna is seemingly endless.[5] However, rarely has this enormous intellectual and cultural productivity been brought in a systematic connection with the pre-democratic tradition of the Habsburg monarchy. Instead, if it has not been considered a mere coincidence, the productivity of Austrian-Viennese culture has been presented "politically correctly" as proof of the positive synergistic effects of a multi-ethnic society and of multi-culturalism.
<font color="white"> . </font>
[5] The list includes Ludwig Boltzmann, Franz Brentano, Rudolph Carnap, Edmund Husserl, Ernst Mach, Alexius Meinong, Karl Popper, Moritz Schlick, and Ludwig Wittgenstein among philosophers; Kurt Goedel, Hans Hahn, Karl Menger, and Richard von Mises among mathematicians; Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk, Gottfried von Haberler, Friedrich von Hayek, Carl Menger, Fritz Machlup, Ludwig von Mises, Oskar Morgenstern, Joseph Schumpeter, and Friedrich von Wieser among economists; Rudolph von Jhering, Hans Kelsen, Anton Menger, and Lorenz von Stein among lawyers and legal theorists, Alfred Adler, Joseph Breuer, Karl Buehler, and Sigmund Freud among psychologists; Max Adler, Otto Bauer, Egon Friedell, Heinrich Friedjung, Paul Lazarsfeld, Gustav Ratzenhofer, and Alfred Schuetz among historians and sociologists; Hermann Broch, Franz Grillparzer, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Karl Kraus, Fritz Mauthner, Robert Musil, Arthur Schnitzler, Georg Trakl, Otto Weininger, and Stefan Zweig among writers and literary critics; Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Adolf Loos, and Egon Schiele among artists and architects; and Alban Berg, Johannes Brahms, Anton Bruckner, Franz Lehar, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, Johann Strauss, Anton von Webern, and Hugo Wolf among composers.

[/ QUOTE ]

In other words, Hoppe attributes the great intellectual productivity to the general level of prosperity of Austria-Hungary under monarchy, which allowed "intellectual capital", if you will, to accumulate and be applied to a great many endeavors.

[cambraceres]

See that's why I post here, rational answers, and even on topic!

Thanks for the understanding kind sages.

Cambraceres

[pzhon]

Hungary seems small. It currently has about 10 million people within its borders. However, it used to be much larger, and there are many more people who can identify themselves as Hungarian. There are currently large Hungarian-speaking populations in Slovakia and Romania, for example, and who would else would speak Hungarian? (senki sem...) One modern Hungarian politician stated, "There are 50 million Hungarians." That wasn't a diplomatic statement, and it might not have been accurate, but the borders of the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were larger.

[mindflayer]

Just for that..

on how to have an accident at a good time??

Watch any episode of Seinfeld.
A great one comes to mind.. the bus boy episode.

George and Jerry are out at dinner..
George gets the bus boy fired;
Later George and Kramer go to visit him.
They leave the door to the appartment open and the bus boy's cat runs away.
There is an explosion in the restaraunt where the bus boy used to work that kills the replacement bus boy....etc.

[keikiwai]

[ QUOTE ]
I live in Hungary and I can tell you that the consensus among the religious right here (10-60% of the population, depending on where you draw the line) is that the religous right are kibaszot kurvak es nyugotan meg dogolhetnek.

[/ QUOTE ]

FYP. My spelling's a little rustY /images/graemlins/cool.gif



Here (http://www.sciforum.hu/GeniusLoci.pdf) is a 1 page article about this phenomenon.

Here is the interesting part:

Besides their birthplace, these men had a
number of other things in common. Most of
them came from the city’s German-speaking
Jewish families, but Szent-Györgi was born
to a rich land-owning family and Gabor’s
father was the director of a mining company.
All of them left their birthplace to attend university
either in Germany (mostly Berlin and
Karlsruhe) or at Zurich’s ETH. And all of
them ended up either in the United States or
the United Kingdom.

But the differences among them are no
less remarkable. Three of the group — Szent-
Györgi in 1937, Wigner in 1963 and Gabor
in 1971 — got Nobel prizes. Szilard, with his
myriad of interests, never settled in one
place, and his fundamental contributions to
modern science are not generally appreciated.
Von Kármán, von Neumann and Teller
contributed much to the United States’ rise
to postwar strategic dominance.

No single fact can explain this phenomenon.
Budapest was not the only city in the
Austro-Hungarian empire brimming with
creativity at this time. In the decade before
the First World War, intellects such as Sigmund
Freud, Gustav Mahler and the physicist
Ernst Mach worked in Vienna. Meanwhile,
Franz Kafka, the painter Alfons
Mucha and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke were
in Prague, where, in 1911–12, Einstein was
developing his general theory of relativity. A
number of factors that von Neumann identified
as being behind the Budapest phenomenon
were present in the other two cities: a
multicultural environment, external pressure
to succeed, “a feeling of extreme insecurity
in the individuals, and the necessity to
produce the unusual or else face extinction”.
But, in the end, only the Budapest group
made such an improbable — and incomparable
— mark on history.

[MidGe]

Umm...

There are three of them right, or is the group much larger to ensure the coincidence are not remarkable??

[ QUOTE ]
Most of them came from the city’s German-speaking Jewish families

[/ QUOTE ]
2 out of 3
[ QUOTE ]
but Szent-Györgi was born to a rich land-owning family and Gabor’s father was the director of a mining company.

[/ QUOTE ]
2 out of 3 again
[ QUOTE ]
either in Germany (mostly Berlin and Karlsruhe) or at Zurich’s ETH.

[/ QUOTE ]
2 out of 3 again
[ QUOTE ]
all of
them ended up either in the United States or the United Kingdom.

[/ QUOTE ]
2 out of 3 again
[ QUOTE ]
Three of the group — Szent- Györgi in 1937, Wigner in 1963 and Gabor in 1971 — got Nobel prizes.

[/ QUOTE ]
3 ... so?
[ QUOTE ]
No single fact can explain this phenomenon.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yeah, phenomenon!!! It is as good as calling it miraculous or god's work... lol.

[ QUOTE ]
But, in the end, only the Budapest group made such an improbable — and incomparable — mark on history.

[/ QUOTE ]

Or any other appropriate arbitrary grouping.. .


Well, if you don't get it, you don't.

[keikiwai]

Many more than 3.

Here is the whole article, since it contains some of the other examples (this is what I linked to):

The ancient Romans had a term for it —
genius loci — and history is not short
of astounding, seemingly inexplicable
concatenations of creative talent. Florence
in the first decade of the sixteenth century is
perhaps the unmatched example: anyone
idling on the Piazza della Signoria for a few
days could have bumped into Leonardo da
Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo and Botticelli.
Other well-known efflorescences of artistic
creativity include Joseph II’s Vienna in the
1780s, where one could have met C. W.
Gluck, Haydn and Mozart in the same
room. Or, eleven decades later, in fin de
siècle Paris one could read the most recent
instalment of Émile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart
cycle, before seeing Claude Monet’s
latest canvases from Giverny, and then
strolling along to a performance of Claude
Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune
in the evening.
But it is not just today’s young adults —
who probably view Silicon Valley as the centre
of the creative world — who would be
unaware that an improbable number of scientific
greats were born in Budapest in the
decade between 1898 and 1908. Between
them, this group were responsible for some
of the twentieth century’s most decisive scientific
advances and, consequently, some of
its fundamental strategic and political transformations.
Leo Szilard, a physicist who both studied
and worked with Einstein and who, together
with Enrico Fermi, patented the first nuclear
fission reactor, was born there in 1898. In the
summer of 1939, Szilard and Eugene Wigner,
born in the city in 1902, persuaded Einstein
to sign the famous letter to President
Franklin Roosevelt that led to the Manhattan
Project. Dennis Gabor, whose research
ranged from pioneering work in holography
to nuclear fusion, was born in 1900, and John
von Neumann three years later.
Von Neumann’s prodigious feats of problem-
solving during the Second World War
— prefigured by his ability to divide eightdigit
numbers in his head at the age of six —
have been overshadowed by his postwar conception
of the stored computer program, the
prototypical architecture of modern computers
(although when told in 1954 of the
idea for FORTRAN, he asked: “Why would
you want more than machine language?”).
Edward Teller, born in 1908, is the only
living member of this group. His fame will
always rest on his contribution to the design
of America’s first thermonuclear weapon,
and on his later advocacy of antiballistic missile
defences.
By pushing the time frame back a bit, and
by admitting bright intellects from beyond
physics, the Budapest circle must be enlarged
— to mention just its most prominent overachievers
— by Theodore von Kármán
(1881–1963), a pioneer in aerodynamics and
aeronautics whose studies of fluid flows
helped to open the era of fast subsonic and
supersonic flight; by Albert Szent-Györgi
(1893–1986), who, after isolating ascorbic
acid (for which he won the Nobel Prize in
Physiology for 1937), went on to identify
actin and myosin, the proteins responsible
for muscle contraction; by Michael Polanyi
(1891–1976), who was not just an outstanding
physical chemist but also an accomplished
economist and philosopher; and by
Arthur Koestler (1905–83), a brilliant writer
and one of the most incisive chroniclers of
the great political and scientific upheavals of
the twentieth century.
Besides their birthplace, these men had a
number of other things in common. Most of
them came from the city’s German-speaking
Jewish families, but Szent-Györgi was born
to a rich land-owning family and Gabor’s
father was the director of a mining company.
All of them left their birthplace to attend university
either in Germany (mostly Berlin and
Karlsruhe) or at Zurich’s ETH. And all of
them ended up either in the United States or
the United Kingdom.
But the differences among them are no
less remarkable. Three of the group — Szent-
Györgi in 1937, Wigner in 1963 and Gabor
in 1971 — got Nobel prizes. Szilard, with his
myriad of interests, never settled in one
place, and his fundamental contributions to
modern science are not generally appreciated.
Von Kármán, von Neumann and Teller
contributed much to the United States’ rise
to postwar strategic dominance.
No single fact can explain this phenomenon.
Budapest was not the only city in the
Austro-Hungarian empire brimming with
creativity at this time. In the decade before
the First World War, intellects such as Sigmund
Freud, Gustav Mahler and the physicist
Ernst Mach worked in Vienna. Meanwhile,
Franz Kafka, the painter Alfons
Mucha and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke were
in Prague, where, in 1911–12, Einstein was
developing his general theory of relativity. A
number of factors that von Neumann identified
as being behind the Budapest phenomenon
were present in the other two cities: a
multicultural environment, external pressure
to succeed, “a feeling of extreme insecurity
in the individuals, and the necessity to
produce the unusual or else face extinction”.
But, in the end, only the Budapest group
made such an improbable — and incomparable
— mark on history.

[cambraceres]

I don't understand your post, but there were more than three gifted geniuses coming from Budapest during this period. The most gifted is generally thought to have been Von Neumann, although this really isn't the important part.

[MidGe]

huh, I read the article...

Something like this can be made of any appropriate arbitrary grouping...


Well, if you don't get it, you don't.

[keikiwai]

[ QUOTE ]
huh, I read the article...

Something like this can be made of any appropriate arbitrary grouping...


Well, if you don't get it, you don't.

[/ QUOTE ]

Well yeah, but this is true of everything in life.

No matter what happens you can say, "Oh it was random."

or you can say "This happened because of such and such."

Or you can move past all that and try to formulate things by saying, "There is such and such possibility that this happened and such and such possibility that it was caused by this."

Ascribing everything to chance is a quick path to apathy.

[MidGe]

[ QUOTE ]
Well yeah, but this is true of everything in life.

[/ QUOTE ]

True.


[ QUOTE ]
Ascribing everything to chance is a quick path to apathy.


[/ QUOTE ]
Better apathy rooted in reality than anything else (especially fanaticism) rooted in arbitrary interpretation.

But hey, it is your life! /images/graemlins/smile.gif

[cambraceres]

[ QUOTE ]
huh, I read the article...

Something like this can be made of any appropriate arbitrary grouping...



[/ QUOTE ]

Noticing an inordinate concentration of intellectual progress in one facet of society isn't odd. This grouping isn't arbitrary.

[Darryl_P]

[ QUOTE ]
the religous right are kibaszot kurvak es nyugotan meg dogolhetnek.


[/ QUOTE ]

You do realize that these are the same people who want to hold the former communists accountable for what they consider to be crimes against humanity while the other side is busy forgetting, putting up smoke screens, sweeping stuff under the rug and practicing moral relativism, do you not?

I take it you disagree with the religious right on this issue as well?

[MidGe]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
huh, I read the article...

Something like this can be made of any appropriate arbitrary grouping...



[/ QUOTE ]

Noticing an inordinate concentration of intellectual progress in one facet of society isn't odd. This grouping isn't arbitrary.

[/ QUOTE ]

It is arbitrary if it is retrospective. It is not a predictor of anything, is it? I mean, it is like saying that because a royal flush was dealt on one table, there is something remarkable about that table.

I am out of this thread now. You have been "fooled by randomness". I suggest you read the book with the eponymous title by Nicholas Nassim Taleb. It has been mentionned on this forum a number of times already.

[Darryl_P]

[ QUOTE ]
You have been "fooled by randomness".

[/ QUOTE ]

Correct. The OP mentioned something that seemed like an extreme longshot. My comments reduced it to a medium longshot. And MidGe is correct in pointing out that a medium longshot is only special if the observation criteria were set out in advance, ie "let's watch Hungary and see what happens" rather than let's watch 100 countries at the same time, look at the most extreme events among the 100 and pretend they were from a random country that we decided to watch.

[cambraceres]

I really would like to understand how this grouping could be considered arbitrary. Arbitrary must mean something else for me than it does for you. I'm interested in understanding this but I don't want to read a book to do so.

i consider the term to mean "without rationale" Or "meaningless" or "random". My understanding of this word is an amalgamation of these terms.

It seems that this grouping is not arbitrary because it was not a random sampling that yielded this concentration of intellectual capability. The capability was noticed, then the fact that many happened to come form one specific area. The grouping is not in my mind arbitrary, this grouping was formed by reality. No one said, let's go see if Hungary has smart people! The smart people came here and showed us what they could do, no one arbitrarily chose Hungary.

Cambraceres

[keikiwai]

[ QUOTE ]
is only special if the observation criteria were set out in advance, ie "let's watch Hungary and see what happens" rather than let's watch 100 countries at the same time, look at the most extreme events among the 100 and pretend they were from a random country that we decided to watch.

[/ QUOTE ]

So if you find a dead person lying face down on the ground with a knife sticking out of his back in a city of thousands, then you must conclude the cause of his death was accidental, unless you decided before his death to track what happens to him?

Just an example to illustrate your logic and where it leads...

[MidGe]

[ QUOTE ]
So if you find a dead person lying face down on the ground with a knife sticking out of his back in a city of thousands, then you must conclude the cause of his death was accidental, unless you decided before his death to track what happens to him?

Just an example to illustrate your logic and where it leads...


[/ QUOTE ]

Your analogy is definitely faulty... It would be like saying the spot where the body was found had some remakable characteristic, above just being where the body was found.

/images/graemlins/confused.gif

[cambraceres]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
So if you find a dead person lying face down on the ground with a knife sticking out of his back in a city of thousands, then you must conclude the cause of his death was accidental, unless you decided before his death to track what happens to him?

Just an example to illustrate your logic and where it leads...


[/ QUOTE ]

Your analogy is definitely faulty... It would be like saying the spot where the body was found had some remakable characteristic, above just being where the body was found.

/images/graemlins/confused.gif

[/ QUOTE ]

I'll agree that the above quote seems to be an invalid analogy, but still do not understand your meaning in the other earlier posts.

[Cyrus]

[ QUOTE ]


I'm talking about the arrival of Von Neumann, Wigner, Szilard.

[/ QUOTE ]And now Béla Tarr.