The Martians of Science
A group biography of five 20th century physicists who were born in Budapest, moved to Germany, and then fled to the US.
- Theodore von Karman
- Leo Szilard
- Eugene Wigner
- John von Neumann
- Edward Teller
They all wound up at Los Alamos, where they were central to the atomic bomb project. There, people sometimes called them “the Martians,” as a joke; they were small (except for von Neumann), balding (except for Teller), and spoke a weird language among themselves. Interestingly, all except Szilard wound up on the American right; that would be unthinkable now. I was looking primarily for more depth on von Neumann, but Hargittai leans pretty heavily on Macrae’s biography for von Neumann. There is a fascinating point that von Neumann was prone to interrupt speakers at seminars and this caused problems. That sounds a lot like Neurath; some people who knew him well thought it reflected a deep insecurity.