Posted: 06 Jul 2005 12:35
by Raju
http://www.bbj.hu/?module=displaystory& ... ormat=html
Satyam sends Hungarian grads to India
By Robert Smyth
Satyam Computer Services Ltd., one of India’s leading IT consulting and services firms, is initiating a training program in which its newest Hungarian recruits will be taken to India. They will later work out of Hungary or elsewhere, serving Satyam clients the world over.
“Other firms are coming to Hungary, while we’re taking Hungary to the world,” said Randhir Mishra, Satyam’s regional director for the CEE region. “We also hope to dispel the myth that Indian companies are taking all the jobs away from Europeans, when we are actually doing quite the opposite, and creating many new high-skill jobs.”
Hungarian IT graduates are seen as having strong basic knowledge on completing their university studies, and building on this, an intense three-month period of training in India equates to two to three years’ experience, explained Suresh Nandihalli, delivery head at Satyam’s “near-shore” CEE development center, which recently opened in Budapest.
“When they return they will be versed in the latest technology, our world-class process and methodology,” he stated. “Fresh grads are eager to learn, and highly flexible in terms of mobility, which we don’t see with experienced people.”
Nandihalli said that Satyam aims to pick “the best of the best,” and train them in special skills in India.
“Hungarian universities have helped us to connect to students,” he said. “Our message that we offer a career, not a job, was well received by students.”
After joining projects, the recruits go through a career path that they choose based on their interests, Nandihalli explained, with their skills continuously advanced via on-the-job coaching from the more experienced members of the team. In this way, he said, a graduate who chooses to become, say, a solution architect, will go through the technical career track and learn the intricacies of solution architecture, while being exposed to the latest developments in the field.
Certain IT skills are somewhat less easy to find in Hungary, explained Mishra, adding that Satyam follows a similar approach globally to ensure that its talent pool of skills in demand is constantly regenerated.
“For some of the special skill sets such as SAP and Siebel, there’s not many people available in Hungary, and those who are available can be very expensive,” said Nandihalli.
Furthermore, the Indian executives noted that such professionals are much less prepared to travel. This, they stressed, is an important industry requirement.
“The movement of experienced people is exaperiencing a real bottleneck,” said Nandihalli. “Our specialists need to spend time with the customers and see what their requirements are.”
He added that Satyam globally brings in 1,400 university graduates to its organization every quarter, with 70% of its overall global recruitment made up of fresh graduates.
“Graduates provide the critical link in our global delivery model, and they are the core that make or break the industry,” said Mishra.
The first batch
The initial intake of 30 Hungarian graduates will travel this Aug. 1 to Satyam’s Global Entry Level Training Center in Hyderabad, one of the key centers of Indian IT, after a two-week orientation period in Budapest. Satyam plans to send regular groups that will gradually increase to around 50-strong in number, said Nandihalli.
During the three-month training period, new recruits undergo a customized training program, Nandihalli explained. The language of instruction is English, and all aspects of the selection procedure – which he noted is the same in every country Satyam recruits from – are also carried out in English.
Several thousand students were trained in Hyderabad last year from countries such as China, Malaysia and Australia, said Nandihalli.
In the second phase of its recruitment program, depending on the response to and success of the current one, Satyam is likely to branch out across the region to recruit students from other countries in the CEE.
By stepping up its presence in Hungary, asserted Mishra, Satyam is further strengthening its commitment to European customers, some of whom have encouraged the Indian firm to get closer to Europe.
“Hungary is an important part of our global delivery model, and one project is often carried out between several countries,” he said. In Europe, Satyam also has a subsidiary in the U.K.
Nandihalli added that near-shore outsourcing is popular with customers who are reluctant to outsource projects to places as far away as India.
“Being part of Europe, it’s easy for our specialists to visit our customers, and for our customers to visit us,” he noted.
Posted: 06 Jul 2005 23:03
by Umrao
Hungarians were the mainstay of USSR computer hardware and software designs. They were the ones who succesfully copied IBM 370 architecture.
***
It can be interpreted as a recognizable preparation of minds that took place in the Hungarian gymnasium, between 1890 and 1930 the best “high school” system in the world according to an article in Europhysics News[2]. Most likely Pais did not read this article by George Marx who cites Norman Macrae (former editor of The Economist and biographer of von Neumann): “The early 20th-century Hungarian education system was the most brilliant the world has seen until its close imitator in post-1945 Japan[3].” Marx explains what accounts for the legendary status of Hungarian schools, in particular the gymnasia. Notably the Minta, the Kemeny Zsigmund and the most legendary “Fasori” Lutheran Gymnasium. Their quality gave their pupils probably an enormous head start over all the school-leavers in the rest of the world. Nobel laureates George de Hevesy, George Olah (both in chemistry), John C. Harsanyi (economics), Eugene P. Wigner, Dennis Gábor (both in physics), and other world famous people like John von Neumann, Leo Szilard, Theodore von Kármán and Edward Teller (physics), Marcel Grossmann (Einstein’s co-worker in relativity), Arthur Koestler (author), Theodore Herzl (founder of Zionism), John C. Kemeny (inventor BASIC and e-mail) and George Soros (financial tycoon) all were educated at this type of school. I don’t believe that this is just a coincidence. Here we see the emergence of creativity from a cultural background that was unmatched by the intellectual environment of schools anywhere else.
The above picture is drastically reinforced by an account of Theodore von Kármán[4] in which he gives an explanation for the Hungarian production of brilliant mathematicians: “The Minta, or Model Gymnasium, became the model for all Hungarian high schools. Mathematics was taught in terms of everyday statistics. We looked up the production of wheat in Hungary, set up tables, drew graphs, learned about the “rate of change” which brought us to the edge of calculus. At no-time did we memorize rules from a book. Instead, we sought to develop them ourselves…. The Minta was the first school in Hungary to put an end to the stiff relationship between the teacher and the pupil which existed at that time. Students could talk to the teachers outside of class and could discuss matters not strictly concerning school. For the first time in Hungary a teacher might go so far as to shake hands with a pupil in the event of their meeting outside of class.
Each year the high schools awarded a national prize for excellence in mathematics. It was known as the Eötvös Prize. Selected students were kept in a closed room and given difficult mathematics problems, which demanded creative and even daring thinking. The teacher of the pupil who won the prize would gain great distinction, so the competition was keen and teachers worked hard to prepare their best students. I tried out for this prize against students of great attainments, and to my delight I managed to win. Now, I note that more than half of all the famous expatriate Hungarian scientists, and almost all the well-known ones in the US have won this prize. I think that this kind of contest is vital to our educational system, and I would like to see more such contests encouraged here in the US and in other countries.”
Once in early life, when I was still active in Analytical Chemistry we always were talking jestingly on international chromatographic congresses about a body with quite a lot of influence (Csaba Horváth, Leslie Ettre, Istvan Halasz and Albert Zlatkis) as the “Hungarian Mafia”. (In the mean time - as well as the majority of the abovementioned bunch of scientists - all naturalized as American citizens). In retrospect I understand where the brains of those chromatographic godfathers were moulded into creative minds. Probably at the same institutions where all the other famous Hungarians were educated. The number of Nobel prizes of “Hungarian-borns” is out of proportion, compared to their percentage of the world population. They got four in chemistry, three in medicine, four in physics, one in economics and one for peace.
The Hungarian school system was not intended exclusively for the education of the “happy few” from the upper ten in the Hungarian society. On the contrary, József Eötvös, the minister of culture during the beginning of the industrial revolution, introduced compulsory schooling and founded secular schools that did not show privilege to any pupil[5]. As witness a random sample recently extracted from the Internet[6] that can bear testimony to the mentioned quality of the Hungarian school system in those days. P.A. Zuckerman writes: “I was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1929. I grew up in poverty, but because of a good public school system I obtained a high level of literacy. …… My good literacy enabled me to become a printer's apprentice. I was essentially an indentured servant, receiving room and board in exchange for working six days a week for my master. But I was learning a skilled trade, and continued my education informally through reading.” Such a case is remarkable in more than one respect because it shows somebody who next to his formal training had also “learned to learn” with merely basic public school education. Broadly speaking such an effect can only be expected at a much higher level of education. The man who was appointed by Eötvös for the actual introduction of the new school system was Mór Kármán. For his pedagogical achievement he was even ennobled by emperor-king Franz Josef in 1889. Budapest demonstrated its adoration for Rátz Lásló, a famous teacher in mathematics from its Lutheran Gymnasium, by naming a street after him, as Amsterdam is cherishing its Prof. Kohnstammstraat, Montessoristraat, Pestalozzihof and inevitably its Theo Thijssenhof, but where on earth could people became nobleman because of their teaching capabilities…….?
Let us shed some light on the impact of a few of the abovementioned famous Hungarians. As the first we take Marcel Grossmann, who was appointed professor of descriptive geometry at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule in 1907. Marcel Grossmann was once Albert Einstein's classmate. As a matter of course Einstein, when he sought to formulate mathematically his ideas on the general theory of relativity turned to Grossmann for assistance. Grossmann introduced Einstein to the differential calculus, started by Elwin Bruno Christoffel (1864) and fully developed at the University of Padua by Gregono Ricci Curbastro and Tullio Levi Civita (1901). The collaboration between Einstein and Grossmann resulted in their article "Entwurf einer verallgemeinerten Relativitätstheorie und einer Theorie der Gravitation" [7]. By allowing the encounter of the mathematical achievements of the Italian geometers and the profound physical insight of Einstein, Marcel Grossmann facilitated the unique synthesis of mathematical and theoretical physics reached by Albert Einstein in the most elegant and powerful field theory of physics: The General Theory of Relativity.
Harsanyi began teaching at UC Berkeley in 1964 as a visiting professor and became a full professor in 1965. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work in game theory (see also von Neumann), a mathematical theory of human behavior in competitive situations that has become a dominant tool for analyzing real-life conflicts in business, management and international relations. He shared the award with two fellow game theorists Reinhard Selten and John Nash. When Harsanyi won the Nobel Prize, he expressed hope that game theory would help public and private institutions make better decisions. In the long run, he said, he hoped this would lead to a higher standard of living and to more peaceful and more cooperative political systems. Game theory uses mathematics to try to predict the outcome of games, such as chess or poker, and is increasingly being applied to political and economic conflict situations, including labor negotiations, price wars, international political conflicts, and even federal auctions, such as bandwidth auctions. Harsanyi's principal contributions to the field addressed the prediction of outcomes in games or situations in which the players lack complete information about each other or the rules of the game. In 1964, Harsanyi was asked to be one of 10 game theorists to advise the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency on its negotiations with the Soviet Union. The team found that it could not advise the U.S. negotiators effectively because neither side knew much about the other - it was a game of incomplete information. Harsanyi subsequently developed a systematic procedure to convert any incomplete-information game into an equivalent complete-information game containing random moves, thereby significantly expanding the applicability of game theory to political and economic conflicts[8].
Besides Harsanyi many other famous Hungarians were heavily involved in activities that appeared to be crucial for the shape of our present world. Over to the next giant.
John von Neumann was born in Budapest, and educated at Zurich and at the universities of Berlin and Budapest. He was a maths prodigy; as a child, he could divide two eight-digit numbers in his head, he entertained family guests by memorizing columns from phone books, then reciting names, addresses and phone numbers perfectly. Earning a doctorate at twenty-two, at twenty-three he became the youngest person to lecture at the University of Berlin. In 1930 he went to the United States to join the faculty of Princeton University and at the age of thirty, along with Albert Einstein, he was appointed one of the first professors of the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey. His contribution to the development of the electronic digital computer was so important, that almost all such machines are now referred to as von Neumann processors. Through the 1930's and early 1940's, Von Neumann worked together with Morganstern on game theory, hoping it would form the basis for a future exact science of economics. In 1937 he was accepted as a U.S. citizen and during World War II he served as a consultant on the Los Alamos atomic-bomb project. In the late 1940's, John von Neumann began to develop a theory of automata. He envisaged a systematic theory which would be mathematical and logical in form, and which would contribute in an essential way to our understanding of natural systems (natural automata) as well as to our understanding of both analogue and digital computers (artificial automata).
Staying in the computer business we turn the spotlight to John Kemeny, also born in Budapest (1926). At that time Hungary had no great industries and very few opportunities for a bright young person, so many of the best and brightest became teachers. As a result they educated a generation of students, which contained a number of world-class mathematicians and physicists all out of proportion to the population of that small nation. The Kemeny family moved to New York City in 1940, and John attended high school there, followed by a study in Princeton during World War II. During his undergraduate days, he also worked on the Manhattan project (the A bomb) in Los Alamos. As a graduate student, he worked as Einstein's mathematical assistant:
"People would ask -- did you know enough physics to help Einstein? My standard line was: Einstein did not need help in physics. But contrary to popular belief, Einstein did need help in mathematics. By which I do not mean that he wasn't good at mathematics. He was very good at it, but he was not an up-to-date research level mathematician. His assistants were mathematicians for two reasons. First of all, in just ordinary calculations, anybody makes mistakes. There were many long calculations, deriving one formula from another to solve a differential equation. They go on forever. A number of times we got the wrong answer. Sometimes one of us got the wrong answer, sometimes the other. The calculations were long enough that if you got the same answer at the end, you were confident. So he needed an assistant for that, and, frankly, I was more up-to-date in mathematics than he was."
In 1953 Kemeny joined the Mathematics Department at Dartmouth became its chairman (in 1955), a position he held until 1967. In that time he was instrumental in building it into a program nationally recognized for innovation and leadership, particularly in the use of computers in education. In 1971 he became President of Dartmouth and served in that position for 11 years. Kemeny has always been a committed teacher and even as President, he continued to teach 2 courses a year, never missing a class! He returned to full-time teaching in 1982 and remains active in mathematics, mathematics education and the uses of computers in education.
Kemeny was very worried about the consequences of nuclear war and worked with the World Federalists to educate people about the dangers. He was even offered a job as its executive director, but Einstein, who was also very concerned, talked him out of accepting it. Einstein reasoned that if you were a paid employee of such a group no one would pay attention to you. The way to be heard, he felt, is first to become first-rate at mathematics or something else -- then you will have an audience. President Carter appointed Kemeny to chair the Presidential Commission to investigate the Three Mile Island accident, and the report the Commission issued in 1979 was very critical of the nuclear power industry and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Kemeny was also very critical of the accuracy of the reports of the accident, which appeared in the news. All too commonly, the reports had the numbers right but with the wrong units, and that substantially changed the meaning of the numbers. (Exactly the same problem wrecked one of the missions to Mars)
Kemeny is also the co-author, with Thomas Kurtz, of the computer programming language BASIC (Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), the most widely used programming language in the world. In 1963, he and Kurtz wanted to make it easy for students to gain access to computing, but the only computers available cost millions of dollars and used relatively difficult-to-learn languages. First they designed the first "time sharing" system so that a single computer could simultaneously serve many users, and then they wrote BASIC to allow those users to write programs easily. The first BASIC program was run at Dartmouth at 2 am on May 4, 1964, and Dartmouth became the leader in accessible computing. In 1984 Kemeny and Kurtz wrote TrueBasic, the language they feel the original BASIC should have evolved into. It remains easy-to-learn and contains features first found in more advanced languages.
Also Leo Szilard (1898 – 1964) was a Hungarian-born physicist (and later on molecular biologist) who helped persuade President Roosevelt to launch the A-bomb project and who had a major share in it. Szilard's ideas included the linear accelerator, cyclotron, electron microscope (patent 1931), and nuclear chain reaction. He began in 1926 a 7-year collaboration with Albert Einstein on the invention of home refrigerators without moving parts. Their joint inventions would include the annular linear induction pump, or Einstein-Szilard pump, that was patented. Hired as consultant by German General Electric Company (A.E.G.) to develop the Einstein-Szilard refrigerator. A prototype refrigerator using this Einstein-Szilard pump successfully operated in the A.E.G. Research Institute.
But the development of it was abandoned due to the invention of Freon and the increasing economic depression. In 1930 he taught a theoretical physics seminar together with Erwin Schrödinger and John von Neumann. Taught seminar on nuclear physics and chemistry with Lise Meitner, the woman that discovered nuclear fission and unjustly was passed over for a Nobel Prize. Szilard fled from Germany to Britain in 1933 to escape Nazi persecution. And as the story goes, while walking through the streets of central London after reading an article about the impossibility of getting energy from atoms -- as he waited for a streetlight at the corner of Southampton Row -- Leo Szilard conceived the neutron chain reaction. He also predicted, immediately on learning of the discovery of fission, that uranium might sustain a chain reaction. In the mean time emigrated to the U.S. he began experiments at Columbia University, in collaboration with Walter Zinn, and demonstrated that neutrons were emitted in fission. But he unsuccessfully proposed that results of the fission experiments should be kept secret because of the danger of a German atomic bomb. Szilard collaborated with Enrico Fermi on an experiment testing a uranium-water system. He proposed the uranium-carbon lattice design for a nuclear reactor. But he unsuccessfully attempted to convince Fermi of the likelihood of a chain reaction and the need to continue experiments. Shortly afterwards he visited Albert Einstein with Eugene Wigner (and later with Edward Teller) to discuss methods of averting a German atomic bomb. Szilard was the man who drafted, from Einstein's dictation, the now famous letter (August 2, 1939) to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
That probably influenced General Groves, head of newly formed Manhattan Project, to declare Szilard to be detriment to the project who should be arrested and interned for the duration of war. But that had not been materialized. He advised colleagues on all aspects of reactor design. He correctly predicted that atoms should be dislocated by radiation damage ("Wigner disease") and could release their stored energy exothermically (the "Szilard complication"). (This effect caused the 1957 Windscale nuclear accident in Britain.) In 1943 Szilard was forced, by General Groves, to sell his atomic energy patent rights to the U.S. government. One year later he became increasingly concerned about the potential of breeder reactors for a post-war nuclear arms race. In 1945 he unsuccessfully sought personal meetings with President Roosevelt, then Truman. He circulated a petition among Manhattan Project scientists opposing use of the atomic bomb on moral grounds. After the end of World War II, he organized a successful opposition to the May-Johnson bill, which should have placed atomic energy under military control. In the same year he testified before U.S. Senate committee on the implications of atomic energy. In 1947 Szilard decided to leave physics for biology. And he also published his "Letter To Stalin," proposing methods for reducing US-USSR tensions, published in the “Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists”. Consequently he publicly opposed the development of the Hydrogen bomb in 1950. Szilard began his participation in the so-called "Pugwash" conferences, established to allow eminent scientists from East and West to discuss peace and world security. Szilard got the Atoms for Peace Award. He had even a personal meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, during Khrushchev's 1960 visit to New York, to propose methods of reducing US-USSR tensions, including the Washington-Moscow "hotline". In 1962 Leo Szilard founded the Council for Abolishing War (later renamed Counsel for a Livable World). He flew even to Switzerland during the Cuban Missile Crisis (because he was one of the few people who was aware that any moment WW III could break out, and really scared) and attempted to avert World War III through personal diplomacy. An equally important subject to Szilard was personal responsibility; therefore he always insisted that scientists should accept moral responsibility for the consequences of their own work.
Another Hungarian kindred spirit was Eugene Paul Wigner (1902 – 1995): same field of expertise and the same mental orientation. During his lifetime he was a major player in the development of the atomic bomb, the design of commercial nuclear reactors, and the progress of nuclear science in general. He was also a central figure in the history of Oak Ridge National Lab (ONRL), where he directed research from 1946 to 1947 with profound influence. His activities brought him numerous accolades, including the Nobel Prize for physics in 1963 for his research on structure of atom & its nucleus. He and von Neumann were once in the same class and knew each other very well from their frequent “adolescent” scientific discussions. Wigner was also a member of the US Atomic Energy Commission and a Professor at Princeton. Co-developed the atomic bomb and is known as the father of Nuclear Engineering.
Wigner was one of a number of Hungarian scientists who came to the United States in the 1930s and made contributions that far outweighed their numbers. (A reviewer of a book on Szilard held that those who theorized that advanced space aliens landed in ancient Egypt or South America were wrong; it had obviously occurred near Budapest.)
In contrast to the occasional eccentricities and brusqueness of his compatriots, Wigner was known for his reticence and courtesy. ORNL staff members recall his waiting in the back of the cafeteria line, talking to employees, as Teller (see underneath) charged to the front. He scheduled appointments with the most humble of staff and kept them. His insights were often helpful to fellow researchers. Clifford Shull recalled in ORNL's First 50 Years that he once mentioned a vexing diffuse scattering problem to Wigner that he and Ernie Wollan had encountered with early neutron scattering experiments. Wigner calmly reflected: "Maybe there is something new here, and maybe we have to relax our notions about conservation of particles." After that succinct vote of confidence, Wollan and Shull charted progress in neutron scattering that eventually resulted in Shull's share of the Nobel last year (1994).
Fellow former ORNL Research Director Alvin Weinberg acclaims Wigner as the founder of nuclear engineering and as a great theoretical physicist who introduced group theory and symmetry principles into physics. In a 1991 talk, Weinberg recalled that Wigner did not suffer fools gladly but was polite about it. If he said something was "very interesting," it meant he thought it was wrong.
Wigner abhorred the Nazi movement. He was responsible for the Manhattan Project idea and the letter to President Roosevelt. It was Wigner who was among those who persuaded Albert Einstein to write his famous atom bomb letter to the President (See also above under Szilard). He later became devoted to civil defense efforts, briefly returning to ORNL from Princeton in 1964 to organize a project. Weinberg credited Wigner with designing the first fast neutron breeder reactor after hearing Enrico Fermi discuss the concept; with suggesting water as a superior production reactor coolant over helium; and "inventing" the high-flux reactor and the curved fuel plate.
Younger scientists in the 1940s, Weinberg recalled, weren't convinced that a chain reaction was possible; "thus, his 37 patents showed vision." Named for him are the Wigner Fellowships, two-year ORNL appointments awarded to today's exceptional young scientists. Wigner received the Fermi Award and shared the Atoms for Peace Award with fellow Hungarian Leo Szilárd.
In sharp contrast to Szilard and Wigner we introduce here their Hungarian opponent Edward Teller (1902 - ) Of all the scientists who worked on the U.S. nuclear weapons program none have led more controversial a career than Edward Teller. Described by one Nobel Prize winner in physics as "one of the most thoughtful statesmen of science," and by another Nobel Prize winner (by Isaac Rabi in 1973, also born in Hungary) as “He's a danger to all that is important. I really do think it would have been a better world without Teller", Teller was recognized by most of his colleagues as being one of the most imaginative and creative physicists alive. But at the same time, his single-minded pursuit of the hydrogen bomb, and his autocratic style alienated many of the scientists he worked with.
The man who would one day be known as the father of the hydrogen bomb in the U.S. was born into a Jewish family on January 15, 1908 in Budapest, Hungary. He grew up during a particularly turbulent time in Hungarian history. Following a short (133 days!) Bolshevik terror regime (more than 580 public executions) of Béla Kún in 1919, the country was ruled by a virulently anti-semitic fascist dictator, Nicholas Horthy. The political upheavals meant the young Teller was only too happy to leave his homeland in 1926 to study in Germany. In 1930 he got his PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Leipzig. Although he accepted a research post in 1931 following his graduation, Teller realized that Hitler's rise to power meant that he should leave Germany as soon as he could.
In 1935 Teller immigrated to the United States to take up a teaching position at George Washington University. His first years in the U.S. marked a new phase of his career: His postdoctoral research had been in quantum mechanics; at George Washington University, he would begin a very productive collaboration with Russian émigré George Gamow in nuclear physics. At the outbreak of the Second World War, scientists became aware that the nucleus of a uranium atom could be split releasing enormous amounts of energy. Teller was among the first scientists recruited to work on the Manhattan Project that was working to develop such a bomb. It was Italian-born physicist Enrico Fermi who first got Teller thinking about an H-bomb. In September 1941, before the United States had even built an A-bomb, he suggested to Teller that an atomic bomb might heat a mass of deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen) sufficiently to ignite a thermonuclear reaction. In the summer of 1942, when Teller joined a group of distinguished physicists who were brainstorming about a design for the atomic bomb, he diverted much of the discussion to the feasibility of a super bomb. Teller travelled to California with his old friend Hans Bethe who remembers that even on the way out to Berkeley Teller was already thinking about the super: "Teller told me that the fission bomb [atomic bomb] was all well and good and, essentially, was now a sure thing.. He said that what we really should think about was the possibility of...the hydrogen bomb."
Shortly after Teller arrived at the newly established weapons laboratory in Los Alamos, his obsession with the H-bomb caused tensions with other scientists, particularly Bethe. Bethe remembers "he declined to take charge of the group which would perform the detailed calculation on the implosion and since the theoretical division was very shorthanded it was necessary to bring in new scientists to do the work that Teller declined to do."
Teller left Los Alamos at the end of the war, returning to the University of Chicago. But when the Soviet Union conducted its first test of an atomic device in August 1949, he did his best to drum up support for a crash program to build a hydrogen bomb. Teller argued that a super bomb was essential to the very survival of the U.S., "If the Russians demonstrate a super before we possess one, our situation will be hopeless." Truman eventually agreed, calling for a hydrogen bomb program at the end of January 1950.
During the course of 1950, Teller was frustrated with the progress of the program. When his initial concept for the bomb didn't appear to work, he insisted that the problem was caused by a shortage of theoreticians at Los Alamos and a lack of imagination. These accusations served to further distance him from the other scientists. When he and mathematician Stanislaw Ulam finally came up with an H-bomb design that would work, Teller was not chosen to head the project. He left Los Alamos and soon joined the newly established Lawrence Livermore laboratory, a rival weapons lab in California.
It was Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance hearings in 1954 that was the occasion for the final rift between Teller and many of his scientific colleagues. Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, had come under scrutiny because of his affiliation with left-leaning political organizations in the 1930s and also because of his consistent opposition to the hydrogen bomb. At Oppenheimer's hearings, Teller testified "I feel I would prefer to see the vital interests of this country in hands that I understand better and therefore trust more." The testimony enraged many in the scientific community, who felt it was a terrible betrayal of the hardworking and loyal Oppenheimer.
Teller has continued to be a tireless advocate of a strong defense policy, calling for the development of advanced thermonuclear weapons and continued nuclear testing. During the Vietnam War his proposals so incensed radical protestors that some of them actually labeled him a "war criminal." In the 1980s, he was a vigorous proponent of a proposed new defense system that came to be known as the Strategic Defense Initiative or more popularly as “Star Wars”.
To illustrate the consequences of the different views see:
U.S. News 8/17/98 SPECIAL REPORT J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER EDWARD TELLER
Brotherhood of the Bomb
Two flinty physicists struggle over their terrifying legacy
J. Robert Oppenheimer, shrunk to a cadaverous 115 pounds by nerves and nicotine, held on to a post to steady himself as a gong signaled that the nuclear age would begin in 10 seconds. "Nine . . . eight . . . seven . . . six . . ." His chain smoker's cough in brief abeyance, he fixed his eyes on a control panel. A voice completed the countdown: "Three . . . two . . . one . . . zero!"
Alamogordo Bombing Range, N.M., 5:30 a.m., July 16, 1945. A Niagara of white light flooded the bunker through an open back door. A few tense seconds later came a resounding, teeth-rattling roar. Oppenheimer and his colleagues emerged to gaze upon their firstborn, which rose before them: a purplish fireball sucking ionized sand and debris from the floor of the desert into a billowing cloud 40,000 feet high. A line from Hindu scripture echoed in Oppenheimer's head: "I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds." Among those watching from a more distant site was an observer as compact and fleshy as Oppenheimer was loose limbed and spectral. Edward Teller had extra protection--he had applied sun lotion to his face and hands and brought a pair of gloves. He even had sunglasses to supplement the welder's glass through which he viewed the Trinity test blast. He was impressed by what he saw. But not overwhelmed. He was sure he could make a bigger super bomb (his firstborn--arriving after eight more years of gestation--would turn out to be 500 times more powerful).
Pumping Oppenheimer's hand, test chief Kenneth Bainbridge said: "Now we're all sons of bitches." Oppenheimer and Teller, soon to be famous foes, would be called this and many other things in the years ahead. The sobriquets that would stick the longest, whether as accolade or indictment, were "father of the atomic bomb" (Oppenheimer) and "father of the hydrogen bomb" (Teller), each physicist achieving paternity in his own way.
Oppenheimer invented the A-bomb (two bombs actually, distinctly different in design) in a mere 28 months by recruiting and cannily deploying against myriad stupefying technical challenges a team that Gen. Leslie Groves called "the greatest collection of eggheads ever." Groves, a can-do engineer fresh from erecting the Pentagon, headed the Manhattan Project from Washington, parceling out work to more than a half-dozen major sites ranging from university campuses to uranium and plutonium processing plants. But the creative center of the super secret program was the Los Alamos laboratory, directed by Oppenheimer. To figure out how to produce a nuclear chain reaction in a militarily deliverable package and bring it to critical mass on command, he needed perhaps 30 scientists, Oppenheimer thought at first. By the end of World War II, his staff had grown to 5,000, crammed into lab buildings, bungalows, and barracks thrown up at a remote mountain site. Nothing rode on the effort other than civilization's future. Or so the men on the mesa felt, not being able to dismiss the worry that Hitler's Herr Professors would invent the A-bomb before they did.
"Ja, ja, ja." From an early age, Robert Oppenheimer had seemed destined to sit well above the salt in the house of intellect. A New York importer's son reared in privilege, he amused himself as a boy by reading Plato in Greek. Graduating from Harvard summa cum laude in three years, he acquired a Ph.D. in physics in Germany from the University of Göttingen, where theoretical physicists were consumed with atomic structure. For all the power of his mind, originality was less his forte than a keen ability to grasp other people's ideas rapidly, spotting any inherent problems. At the University of California--Berkeley, where he taught for a decade before the war, Oppenheimer stimulated discourse with a quirk picked up in Germany. "Ja, ja, ja," he would say encouragingly. Students found themselves parroting the habit. At the blackboard, he frenetically juggled a cigarette and a piece of chalk with dexterity, never forgetting which to write with, which to smoke.
The charisma went with him to Los Alamos. There, however, his charges were not worshipful graduate students but seasoned scholars accustomed to deference. Oppenheimer the professor had often let his arrogance show when in the company of men who fancied themselves his equals; if someone made an utterance that struck him as unforgivably banal, he'd turn up his nose, narrow his blue eyes, and skewer the offender with a little arrow of corrosive wit. Oppenheimer the lab director could not afford such indulgences. To induce such renowned scientific spark plugs as Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, Hans Bethe, John von Neumann, and Teller to work together productively, he had to reformulate his personality, moving tact and charm to front burners. The chemistry experiment continued after hours, when "Oppie" measured out gin, vermouth, and magnetism to his guests in just the right proportions.
Esprit de corps remained high at Los Alamos throughout the war, but as success drew nearer, Oppenheimer had to use his wiles to contain rising misgivings among project scientists about how the bomb would be used and how it would affect the postwar world. Nazi Germany had collapsed by the time the A-bomb was ready, leaving Japan as the only potential target. A petition was circulated calling for a "demonstration" use of the bomb to persuade Tokyo to surrender. Oppenheimer did his best to stifle that debate; he argued for targeting a city or cities. Yet after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the twinge of remorse he felt at the Trinity test began to grow. He had become world famous overnight, his string-bean frame topped with a porkpie hat splashed across every newspaper. As much as he enjoyed the stir he caused when he entered a room, he felt a trifle unclean. Meeting with Harry Truman in 1946, he exclaimed, "Mr. President, I have blood on my hands." (Truman later told Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson not to "bring that fellow around again. . . All he did was make the bomb. I'm the guy who fired it off.")
Oppenheimer's postwar misgivings about nuclear power worsened his strained relations with Edward Teller, who in due course would be remembered as his betrayer. Teller had had an even earlier role than Oppenheimer in setting the Manhattan Project in motion. When Leo Szilard visited Albert Einstein on Long Island to get his signature on a famous letter to Franklin Roosevelt that sparked the atomic program, it was Teller who drove the car. Two years later, in 1941, Teller had a fateful lunch with Enrico Fermi, his colleague at Columbia. Fermi suggested that nuclear fission would in turn make it possible to achieve on Earth nuclear fusion--the fusing of light nuclei, such as those in hydrogen, that occurs naturally in stars, releasing vast amounts of energy. Teller instantly became hooked on the challenge of building a thermonuclear bomb.
Teller was the intellectual equal of the leading luminaries of Los Alamos, a number of whom, like him, were Jewish émigrés from Hungary. But he was no team player. He was affable and obliging one moment, moody and overbearing the next. As a child in Budapest, the son of a lawyer, he frequently lost himself so deeply in thought that he would beseech family members, "Please don't talk to me. I have a problem." At Los Alamos, he was often seen taking long solitary walks, advancing with a slight limp, his arms strangely out of sync, his heavy black eyebrows rising and falling as he cogitated. At night, he was less seen than heard. It was not beyond him to discharge tension by pounding out Mozart on his Steinway at 3 a.m. Teller refused some of the chores he was given and protested that he was left too little time to work on "the Super"--the hydrogen bomb. Oppenheimer, who had angered Teller by not naming him head of the theoretical division, went to some lengths to placate him.
"Keep your shirt on." After the war, Teller decided that with the Nazis out of the way, Russia was the new threat to his adopted land. He asked Oppenheimer to support continued work on the H-bomb and got a swift rebuff: "I neither can nor will do so." The Atomic Energy Commission was created to administer nuclear policy and Oppenheimer was elected chairman of a panel of scientists advising the AEC. While Teller led the campaign for the H-bomb, Oppenheimer's advisory group in 1949 recommended that the United States set an example to the world (i.e., the U.S.S.R.) by forswearing thermonuclear research. Teller won the argument with help from Joseph Stalin. The Soviet Union tested an atomic bomb ("Joe I"), ending the West's monopoly. Would a Soviet H-bomb be next? Teller voiced alarm in a phone call to Oppenheimer, who advised: "Keep your shirt on." A chill shot through Congress and the executive branch. Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist hysteria was soon to begin. President Truman ordered a crash program to build the hydrogen bomb.
Teller felt a heady new sense of purpose. He placed an ad in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to draw talent back to Los Alamos: "The holiday is over. Hydrogen bombs will not produce themselves." Triumph soon turned to calamity. Stanislaw Ulam, a brilliant mathematician, tested Teller's 1946 model for the Super and concluded it wouldn't work. Teller, "pale with fury" in Ulam's words, attacked both Ulam's calculations and his motives. But the new ENIAC computer confirmed the findings. Teller's classical design was, as Ulam had said, "a fizzle." It would not generate enough heat to cause a thermonuclear reaction. Teller was thrown into months of worry and wheel spinning. Then, Ulam came up with the germ of a solution--using two fission bombs, the second exploded by the first, to achieve a thermonuclear reaction. Teller altered Ulam's general concept in significant ways and translated it into an elegant bomb design that gave every promise of working. Even Oppenheimer paid tribute, calling the new configuration "technically . . . sweet."
Yet Teller left Los Alamos before the first thermonuclear device could be built and tested. Denied control of the H-bomb program by lab bosses all too familiar with his mercurial nature, he departed in some bitterness and stepped up his winning crusade for creation of the Livermore Laboratory in California, a new thermonuclear research center. Come Nov. 1, 1952, when Los Alamos personnel exploded "Mike" (the first test of the Teller-Ulam H-bomb design), Teller stayed home. But he learned of the test's success before the brass at Los Alamos did. An associate heard the shot's firing signal on shortwave radio, and Teller, hovering over a seismograph in Berkeley, saw the shock wave from Eniwetok atoll. His puckish telegram to his ex-colleagues echoed proud papas through the ages: "It's a boy."
"I was an idiot." Although Oppenheimer supported the H-bomb program in a fashion after Truman's order, his misgivings kept resurfacing. He told one newsman that the hydrogen bomb was "the plague of Thebes." He wrote an article likening the United States and the Soviet Union to "two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other but only at the risk of its own life." Some critics saw his opposition to the H-bomb as proof of disloyalty. They launched a security investigation of him in 1954. Oppenheimer had in fact had ties to homegrown Communists before the war. He had a girlfriend who was a party member, his brother had been a party member, and he himself had belonged (as he told security officers in 1942) to "just about every Communist front organization on the West Coast." The probe uncovered no evidence of disloyalty--but much evidence of bad judgment. It came to light that during the war Oppenheimer had misrepresented pertinent facts about an apparent Soviet espionage attempt. His motive may have been both to protect a friend and deflect suspicion from himself. Asked at the 1954 hearings why he had lied, Oppenheimer said only: "Because I was an idiot."
A parade of Oppenheimer's former colleagues appeared as character witnesses. Edward Teller, however, was in no mood to ride to the rescue. Certain that Oppenheimer's foot dragging on the H-bomb had deprived the United States of its lead in the arms race; he would mince no words. Teller told the security panel: "I thoroughly disagreed with him in numerous issues, and his actions frankly appeared to me confused and complicated. . . . I feel I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better and therefore trust more." If the issue was loyalty, he said, he did "not see any reason to deny clearance." On the other hand, he added, "if it is a question of wisdom and judgment, as demonstrated by actions since 1945, then I would say one would be wiser not to grant clearance." Two months later, the Atomic Energy Commission voted 4-1 to refuse Oppenheimer a security clearance.
His days as a high-level government adviser over, Oppenheimer settled into his new role in national life--martyr to the cold war hysteria of the early 1950s. Scientists and liberal intellectuals made pilgrimages to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., where he presided as director, and came home with stories of their audiences with him. His gauntness, which increased as he aged, made him look ever more saintly. Teller, by contrast, emerged from the Oppenheimer security hearings looking ever more sinister to his former colleagues, who could not forgive him for testifying against "Oppie." Shortly thereafter, an old friend refused to shake Teller's hand during a chance meeting; Teller returned to his hotel room and cried. It was the start of many years of ostracism by liberal intellectuals that would cause him much anguish. As resilient as his ego was, Teller craved camaraderie. He forged new friendships among conservatives and military-industrial people, becoming their Oppenheimer--the steadfast servant of conscience--but a conscience that led headlong in the direction of full nuclear preparedness.
Postscript: The U.S. government officially rehabilitated Oppenheimer in 1963, President Johnson giving him the AEC's Enrico Fermi Award in a White House ceremony attended by Teller. Oppenheimer died in 1967 at age 62. Teller turned 90 in January 1998. Outliving most of his detractors, he had survived to see the West's peaceful triumph over the Soviet Union, to see nuclear weapons seemingly abolish world war. All his life he had believed science could save humanity from doom. And it had. So far.
The Diaspora of the Hungarian intellect was caused by World War I, the Habsburg decline, the economic depression, the anti-Semitic Horthy regime and the rise of Nazi-Germany, to name a few reasons. Undoubtedly this shaped their ambivalent attitude of mind, with which they on the one hand assiduously pursued the production of an atomic bomb before the anticipated disaster of the Nazi’s having one at their disposal, and on the other hand transformed themselves into opponents of further development of such terrifying destruction weapons (with the obvious exception of Teller, who was once described by Isidor Rabi as the worst product of humankind).
As for Cornelius Lanczos (a third brilliant ex-Hungarian scientist who once assisted Einstein with the mathematics for his General Relativity) applies: “A life’s work in exile”; this applies equally well to all the others that are mentioned above. Without those ex-Hungarians the world would have been different today. How different cannot de determined. Hungarians probably are not more intelligent than other nationalities but they were during the specified period much better educated. Maybe education is a national hobby in Hungary that even infected a famous composer like Béla Bártok. Every pianist has probably heard of his piano education course: “Microcosmos”. A name quite in contrast with the enormous influence that ex-Hungarian physicists had on the shape of the present day world by playing first fiddle in the development of general relativity, nuclear power, atomic bombs, balance of power, game theory and computing, all closely interweaved subjects. In short the tragedy of Hungary can be described as a country that expelled her top-talent after breeding it[9] [10] and allowed it to shape the world instead of its native soil.
Epilogue:
This story ends here with the words from the beginning of Francis Crick's book The Life Itself:
Enrico Fermi was a man with outstanding talents; he had many interests outside his own particular field. He was credited with asking famous questions. There are long preambles to Fermi’s questions like this: – "The universe is vast, containing myriads of stars, many of them not unlike our Sun. Many of these stars are likely to have planets circling around them. A fair fraction of these planets will have liquid water on their surface and a gaseous atmosphere. The energy pouring down from a star will cause the synthesis of organic compounds, turning the ocean into a thin, warm soup. These chemicals will join each other to produce a self-reproducing system. The simplest living things will multiply, evolve by natural selection and become more complicated till eventually active, thinking creatures will emerge. Civilization, science, and technology will follow. Then, yearning for fresh worlds, they will travel to neighboring planets, and later to planets of nearby stars. Eventually they should spread out all over the Galaxy. These highly exceptional and talented people could hardly overlook such a beautiful place as our Earth. And so," – Fermi came to his overwhelming question, – "if all this has been happening, they should have arrived here by now, so WHERE ARE THEY?" – It was Leo Szilard, a man with an impish sense of humor, who supplied the perfect reply to Fermi's rhetoric: – "They are among us," - he said, – "but they call themselves Hungarians."
Well, this is an instance no one feels like gloating about being proven right.