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 and the rest of the world's population.

[Fly]

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

[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 [img]/images/graemlins/cool.gif[/img]



Here 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.

[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?

[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 (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.