The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project
I.
A group of Manhattan Project physicists created a tongue-in-cheek mythology where superintelligent Martian scouts landed in Budapest in the late 19th century and stayed for about a generation, after which they decided the planet was unsuitable for their needs and disappeared. The only clue to their existence were the children they had with local women.
The joke was that this explained why the Manhattan Project was led by a group of Hungarian supergeniuses, all born in Budapest between 1890 and 1920. These included Manhattan Project founder Leo Szilard, H-bomb creator Edward Teller, Nobel-Prize-winning quantum physicist Eugene Wigner, and legendary polymath John von Neumann, namesake of the List Of Things Named After John Von Neumann.
The coincidences actually pile up beyond this. Von Neumann, Wigner, and possibly Teller all went to the same central Budapest high school at about the same time, leading a friend to joke about the atomic bomb being basically a Hungarian high school science fair project.
But maybe we shouldn’t be joking about this so much. Suppose we learned that Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach all had the same childhood piano tutor. It sounds less like “ha ha, what a funny coincidence” and more like “wait, who was this guy, and how quickly can we make everyone else start doing what he did?”
In this case, the guy was Laszlo Ratz, legendary Budapest high school math teacher. I didn’t even know people told legends about high school math teachers, but apparently they do, and this guy features in a lot of them. There is apparently a Laszlo Ratz Memorial Congress for high school math teachers each year, and a Laszlo Ratz medal for services to the profession. There are plaques and statues to this guy. It’s pretty impressive.
A while ago I looked into the literature on teachers and concluded that they didn’t have much effect overall. Similarly, Freddie deBoer writes that most claims that certain schools or programs have transformative effects on their students are the result of selection bias.
On the other hand, we have a Hungarian academy producing like half the brainpower behind 20th century physics, and Nobel laureates who literally keep a picture of their high school math teacher on the wall of their office to inspire them. Perhaps even if teachers don’t explain much of the existing variability, there are heights of teacherdom so rare that they don’t show up in the statistics, but still exist to be aspired to?
II.
I’ve heard this argument a few times, and I think it’s wrong.
Yes, two of Ratz’s students went on to become supergeniuses. But Edward Teller, another supergenius, went to the same high school but (as far as I know) was never taught by Ratz himself. That suggests that the school was good at producing supergeniuses regarldess of Ratz’s personal qualities. A further point in support of this: John Harsanyi also went to the school, also wasn’t directly taught by Ratz, and also went on to win a Nobel Prize and invent various important fields of mathematics. So this school – the Fasori Gymnasium – seems to have been about equally excellent for both its Ratz-taught and its non-Ratz-taught pupils.
Yet the Fasori Gymnasium might not have even been the best high school in its neighborhood. It competed with the Minta Gymnasium half a mile down the street, whose alumni include Manhattan Project physicists Nicholas Kurti and Theodore von Karman (von Karman went on to found the Jet Propulsion Laboratory), brilliant chemist-philosopher Michael Polanyi, economists Thomas Balogh and Nicholas Kaldor (of Kaldor-Hicks efficiency fame), and Peter Lax, who once said “You don’t have to be Hungarian to be a mathematician – but it helps”. There are also some contradictory sources suggesting Teller attended this school and not Fasori; for all I know he might have attended both. Once again, most of these people were born in the 1890-1910 period when the Martian scouts were supposedly in Budapest.
Worse, I’m not even sure that the best high school in early 20th-century Hungary was either of the two mentioned above. The Berzsenyi Gymnasium, a two mile walk down Gyorgy Street from the others, boasts alumni including multizillionaire George Soros, Intel founder Andrew Grove, BASIC inventor John Kemeny, leading cancer biologist George Klein, great mathematician George Polya, and Nobel Prize winning physicist Dennis Gabor.
Given that the Fasori Gymnasium wasn’t obviously better than either of these others, is it possible that the excellence was at a higher level – neither excellent teachers nor excellent principals, but some kind of generally excellent Hungarian culture of education?
This is definitely what the Hungarians want us to think. According to Cultures of Creativity:
What’s so special about Budapest’s schools? A certain elitism and a spirit of competition partly explains the successes of their students. For example, annual competitions in mathematics and physics have been held since 1894. The instruction the students receive as well as these contests are an expression of a special pedagogy and a striving to encourage creativity. Mor Karman, founder of the Minta school, believed that everything should be taught by showing its relation to everyday life. Instead of learning rules by heart from books, students tried to formulate the rules themselves.
This paper on “The Hungarian Phenomenon” makes similar claims, but adds a few more details:
The Eotvos Contests were a powerful mean for the stimulation of mathematics on a large scale and were used to motivate mathematical culture in the society. It also provided a channel to search for talented youths. The contests, which have been open to Hungarian high school students in their last year since 1894, played a remarkable role in the development of mathematics.
Okay. But I want to challenge this. During this era, formal education in Hungary began at age 10. By age ten, John von Neumann, greatest of the Hungarian supergeniuses, already spoke English, French, German, Italian, and Ancient Greek, knew integral and differential calculus, and could multiply and divide 8-digit numbers in his head. Wikipedia notes that on his first meeting with his math teacher, the math teacher “was so astounded with the boy’s mathematical talent that he was brought to tears”. This doesn’t sound like a guy whose potential was kindled by formal education. This sounds like a guy who would have become one of history’s great mathematicians even if his teachers had slept through his entire high school career.
Likewise, the book above notes that Dennis Gabor, the Hungarian inventor of holography, “developed his passion for physics during his youth, but did so for the most part on his own”. His biography notes that “During his childhood in Budapest, Gabor and his brother would often duplicate the experiments they read about in scientific journals in their home laboratory.”
Likewise, consider Paul Erdos, a brilliant mathematician born in Budapest around this time. As per his Wikipedia page, “Left to his own devices, he taught himself to read through mathematics texts that his parents left around their home. By the age of four, given a person’s age, he could calculate, in his head, how many seconds they had lived.”
I have no knock-down proof that Hungary’s clearly excellent education system didn’t contribute to this phenomenon. A lot of child prodigies burn out, and maybe Hungary was unusually good at making sure that didn’t happen. But it sure seems like they had a lot of child prodigies to work with.
So what’s going on? Should we just accept the Manhattan Project consensus that there was a superintelligent Martian scout force in early 20th-century Budapest?
III.
Here’s something interesting: every single person I mentioned above is of Jewish descent. Every single one. This isn’t some clever setup where I only selected Jewish-Hungarians in order to spring this on you later. I selected all the interesting Hungarians I could find, then went back and checked, and every one of them was Jewish.
This puts the excellence of the Hungarian education system in a different light. Hungarian schools totally failed to work their magic on Gentiles. You can talk all you want about “elitism and a spirit of competition” and “striving to encourage creativity”, yet for some reason this worked on exactly one of Hungary’s many ethnic groups.
This reduces the difficult question of Hungarian intellectual achievement to the easier question of Jewish intellectual achievement.
I say “easier question” because I find the solution by Cochran, Hardy, and Harpending really compelling. Their paper is called A Natural History Of Ashkenazi Intelligence (“Ashkenazi” means Eastern European Jew) and they start by expressing the extent of the issue:
Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQ of any ethnic group for which there are reliable data. They score 0.75 to 1.0 standard deviations above the general European average, corresponding to an IQ 112 – 115. This fact has social significance because IQ (as measured by IQ tests) is the best predictor we have of success in academic subjects and most jobs. Ashkenazi Jews are just as successful as their tested IQ would predict, and they are hugely overrepresented in occupations and fields with the highest cognitive demands. During the 20th century, they made up about 3% of the US population but won 27% of the US Nobel science prizes and 25% of the Turing Awards [in computer science]. They account for more than half of world chess champions.
This doesn’t seem to be due to any advantage in material privilege; Ashkenazi Jews frequently did well even in countries where they were persecuted. Nor is it obviously linked to Jewish culture; Jews from other regions of the world show no such advantage. So what’s going on?
Doctors have long noted that Ashkenazi Jews are uniquely susceptible to various genetic diseases. For example, they’re about a hundred times more likely to have Gaucher’s Disease, a hundred times more likely to get Tay-Sachs Disease, ten times more likely to have torsion dystonia, et cetera. Genetic diseases are so common in this population that the are official recommendation is that all Ashkenazi Jewish couples get screened for genetic disease before marriage. I’m Ashkenazi Jewish, I got screened, and I turn out to be a carrier for Riley-Day syndrome – three hundred times as common in Ashkenazi Jews as in anyone else.
Evolution usually gets rid of genetic diseases pretty quickly. If they stick around, it’s because they’re doing something to earn their keep. One common pattern is “heterozygote advantage” – two copies of the gene cause a disease, but one copy does something good. For example, people with two copies of the sickle cell gene get sickle cell anaemia, but people with one copy get some protection against malaria. In Africa, where malaria is relatively common, the tradeoff is worth it – so people of African descent have high rates of the sickle cell gene and correspondingly high rates of sickle cell anaemia. In other places, where malaria is relatively uncommon, the tradeoff isn’t worth it and evolution eliminates the sickle cell gene. That’s why sickle cell is about a hundred times more common in US blacks than US whites.
The moral of the story is: populations can have genetic diseases if they also provide a useful advantage to carriers. And if those genetic diseases are limited to a single group, we expect them to provide a useful advantage for that group, but not others. Might the Jewish genetic diseases provide some advantage? And why would that advantage be limited to Jews?
Most of the Jewish genetic diseases cluster into two biological systems – the sphingolipid system and the DNA repair system. This is suspicious. It suggests that they’re not just random. They’re doing something specific. Both of these systems are related to neural growth and neural branching. Might they be doing something to the brain?
Gaucher’s disease, one of the Ashkenazi genetic diseases, appears to increase IQ. CHH obtained a list of all of the Gaucher’s patients in Israel. They were about 15 times more likely than the Israeli average to be in high-IQ occupations like scientist or engineer; CHH calculate the probability that this is a coincidence to be 4×10^-19.
Torsion dystonia, another Ashkenazi genetic disease, shows a similar pattern. CHH find ten reports in the literature where doctors comment on unusual levels of intelligence in their torsion dystonia patients. Eldridge, Harlan, Cooper, and Riklan tested 14 torsion dystonia patients and found an average IQ of 121; another similar study found an average of 117. Torsion dystonia is pretty horrendous, but sufferers will at least get the consolation prize of being really, really smart.
Moving from medicine to history, we find that Ashkenazi Jews were persecuted for the better part of a millennium, and the particular form of this persecution was locking them out of various jobs until the main career opportunities open to them were things like banker, merchant, and doctor. CHH write:
For 800 to 900 years, from roughly 800 AD to 1650 or 1700 AD, the great majority of the Ashkenazi Jews had managerial and financial jobs, jobs of high complexity, and were neither farmers nor craftsmen. In this they differed from all other settled peoples of which we have knowledge.
They continue:
Jews who were particularly good at these jobs enjoyed increased reproductive success. Weinryb (1972, see also Hundert 1992) comments: “More children survived to adulthood in affluent families than in less affluent ones. A number of genealogies of business leaders, prominent rabbis, community leaders, and the like – generally belonging to the more affluent classes – show that such people often had four, six, sometimes even eight or nine children who reached adulthood. On the other hands, there are some indications that poorer families tended to be small ones…as an example, in a census of the town of Brody in 1764 homeowner households had 1.2 children per adult member while tenant households had 0.6.
Now we can start to sketch out the theory in full. Due to persecution, Jews were pushed into cognitively-demanding occupations like banker or merchant and forced to sink or swim. The ones who swam – people who were intellectually up to the challenge – had more kids than the ones who sank, producing an evolutionary pressure in favor of intelligence greater than that in any other ethnic group. Just as Africans experiencing evolutionary pressure for malaria resistance developed the sickle cell gene, so Ashkenazim experiencing evolutionary pressure for intelligence developed a bunch of genes which increased heterozygotes’ IQ but caused serious genetic disease in homozygotes. As a result, Ashkenazi ended up somewhat more intelligent – and somewhat more prone to genetic disease – than the rest of the European population.
If true, this would explain the 27% of Nobel Prizes and 50% of world chess champions thing. But one still has to ask – everywhere had Jews. Why Hungary in particular? What was so special about Budapest in the early 1900s?
IV.
Okay, sure, everywhere had Jews. But it’s surprising exactly how many Jews were in early 1900s Hungary.
The modern United States is about 2% Jewish. Hungary in 1900 was about 5%. The most Jewish city in America, New York, is about 15% Jewish. Budapest in 1900 was 25%. It was one of the most Jewish large cities anywhere in history, excepting only Israel itself. According to Wikipedia, the city’s late 19th-century nickname was “Judapest”.
So is it possible that all the Jews were winning Nobel Prizes, and Hungary just had more Jews and so more Nobelists?
No. This doesn’t seem right. The 1933 European Jewish Population By Country site lists the following size for each country’s Jewish communities:
Poland: 3 million
Russia: 2.5 million
Romania: 750,000
Germany: 500,000
Hungary: 500,000
Britain: 300,000
France: 250,000
Austria: 200,000
It’s hard to find a good list of all famous Manhattan Project physicists, but I tried this article and got the following number of famous Jewish Manhattan Project physicists per country of origin:
Hungary: 4
Germany: 2
Poland: 2
Austria: 2
Italy: 1
Netherlands: 1
Switzerland: 1
Here’s an alternative source with a different definition of “famous”, broken down the same way:
Germany: 5
Hungary: 4
Poland: 3
Italy: 2
Austria: 2
The main point seems to be disproportionately many people from Central European countries like Hungary and Germany, compared to either Eastern European countries like Poland and Russia or Western European countries like France and Britain.
The Central European advantage over Western Europe is unsurprising; the Western European Jews probably weren’t Ashkenazim, and so didn’t have the advantage mentioned in the CHH paper above. But is there any reason to think that Central European Jews were more intelligent than Polish and Russian Jews?
I’m not really sure what to think about this. This paper finds that the sphingolipidoses and other Jewish genetic diseases are about twice as common in Central European Jews as in Eastern European Jews, but I have very low confidence in these results. Intra-Jewish gossip points out the Lithuanians as the geniuses among world Jewry, but doesn’t have any similar suggestions about Hungarians. And torsion dystonia, maybe the most clearly IQ-linked disease, is unique to Lithuanians and absent in Hungarians.
Probably much more promising is just to focus on the obvious facts of the social situation. Early`1900s Hungary was a great nation and a prosperous center of learning. Remember, we’re talking about the age of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, one of the most industrialized and dynamic economies of the time. It might have had advantages that Poland, Romania, and Russia didn’t. My list of historical national GDPs per capita is very unimpressed by the difference between Hungarian and Polish GDPs in 1900, but maybe it’s wrong, or maybe Budapest was an especially modern part of Hungary, or maybe there’s something else I’m missing.
Also, there could have been a difference in the position of Jews in these countries. Russia was still experiencing frequent anti-Jewish pogroms in 1900; in Hungary, Jews were among the country’s most noble families. Actually, the extent of Jewish wealth and influence in Hungary sort of defies belief. According to Wikipedia, in 1920 Jews were 60% of Hungarian doctors, 50% of lawyers, 40% of engineers and chemists, and 90% of currency brokers and stock exchange members. “In interwar Hungary, more than half and perhaps as much as 90 percent of Hungarian industry was owned or operated by a few closely related Jewish banking families.”
So Central European Jews – the Jews in Hungary and Germany – had a unique combination of intellectual and financial advantages. This means Hungary’s only real rival here is Germany. Since they were rich, industrialized, and pretty liberal about Jewish rights at the beginning of the 20th century – and since they had just as many Jews as Hungary – we should expect to see the same phenomenon there too.
And we kind of do. Germany produced its share of Jewish geniuses. Hans Bethe worked for the Manhattan Project and won a Nobel Prize. Max Born helped develop quantum mechanics and also won a Nobel Prize. James Franck, more quantum physics, another Nobel Prize. Otto Stern, even more quantum physics, yet another Nobel Prize. John Polanyi, chemical kinetics, Nobel Prize (although he was half-Hungarian). And of course we probably shouldn’t forget about that Einstein guy. All of these people were born in the same 1880 – 1920 window as the Martians in Hungary.
I think what’s going on is this: Germany and Hungary had about the same Jewish population. And they produced about the same number of genius physicists in the same window. But we think of Germany as a big rich country, and Hungary as a small poor country. And the German Jews were spread over a bunch of different cities, whereas the Hungarian Jews were all crammed into Budapest. So when we hear “there were X Nobel Prize winning German physicists in the early 1900s”, it sounds only mildly impressive. But when we hear “there were X Nobel Prize winning physicists from Budapest in the early 1900s”, it sounds kind of shocking. But the denominator isn’t the number of Germans vs. Hungarians, it’s the number of German Jews vs. Hungarian Jews, which is about the same.
V.
This still leaves one question: why the period 1880 to 1920?
On further reflection, this isn’t much of a mystery. The emancipation of the Jews in Eastern Europe was a difficult process that took place throughout the 19th century. Even when it happened, it took a while for the first generation of Jews to get rich enough that their children could afford to go to fancy schools and fritter away their lives on impractical subjects like physics and chemistry. In much of Eastern Europe, the Jews born around 1880 were the first generation that was free to pursue what they wanted and seek their own lot in the world.
The end date around 1920 is more depressing: any Jew born after this time probably wasn’t old enough to escape the Nazis. Almost all the famous Hungarian Jews became physics professors in Europe, fled to America during WWII using channels open to famous physicists, and then made most of their achievements on this side of the Atlantic. There are a couple of stragglers born after 1920 who survived – George Soros’ family lived because they bought identity documents saying they were Christian; Andrew Grove lived because he was hidden by righteous Gentiles. But in general Jews born in Europe after 1920 didn’t have a great life expectancy.
All of this suggests a pretty reasonable explanation of the Martian phenomenon. For the reasons suggested by Cochran, Hardy, and Harpending, Ashkenazi Jews had the potential for very high intelligence. They were mostly too poor and discriminated against to take advantage of it. Around 1880, this changed in a few advanced Central European economies like Germany, Austria, and Hungary. Austria didn’t have many Jews. Germany had a lot of Jews, but it was a big country, so nobody really noticed. Hungary had a lot of Jews, all concentrated in Budapest, and so it was really surprising when all of a sudden everyone from Budapest started winning Nobel Prizes around the same time. This continued until World War II, and then all anyone remembered was “Hey, wasn’t it funny that so many smart people were born in Budapest between 1880 and 1920?”
And this story is really, really, gloomy.
For centuries, Europe was sitting on this vast untapped resource of potential geniuses. Around 1880, in a few countries only, economic and political conditions finally became ripe for the potential to be realized. The result was one of the greatest spurts of progress in scientific history, bringing us relativity, quantum mechanics, nuclear bombs, dazzling new mathematical systems, the foundations of digital computing, and various other abstruse ideas I don’t even pretend to understand. This lasted for approximately one generation, after which a psychopath with a stupid mustache killed everyone involved.
I certainly can’t claim that the Jews were the only people being crazy smart in Central Europe around this time. This was the age of Bohr, Schrodinger, Planck, Curie, etc. But part of me wonders even here. If you have one physicist in a town, he sits in an armchair and thinks. If you have five physicists in a town, they meet and talk and try to help each other with their theories. If you have fifty physicists in a town, they can get funding and start a university department. If you have a hundred, maybe some of them can go into teaching or administration and help support the others. Having this extra concentration of talent in central Europe during this period might have helped Jews and Gentiles alike.
I wonder about this because of a sentiment I hear a lot, from people who know more about physics than I do, that we just don’t get people like John von Neumann or Leo Szilard anymore. That there was some weird magical productivity to the early 20th century, especially in Central Europe and Central European immigrants to the United States, that we’re no longer really able to match. This can’t be a pure numbers game – the Ashkenazi population has mostly recovered since the Holocaust, and people from all over the world are coming to American and European universities and providing more of a concentration of talent than ever. And even though it’s impossible to measure, there’s still a feeling that it’s not enough.
I started down this particular research rabbit hole because a friend challenged me to explain what was so magical about early 20th century Hungary. I think the Jewish population calculations above explain a lot of the story. I’m not sure whether there’s a missing ingredient, or, if so, what it might be. Maybe it really was better education. Maybe it really was math competitions and talent searches.
Or maybe it was superintelligent Martian scouts with an Earthling fetish.
I don’t really believe in your jewish superiority hypothesis, I found an interesting wikipedia article though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence I might have another explanation. But first of all genetics does not work the same speed as you think. A few thousand years does not matter at all unless a very high percent of the population is wiped out by a disease like the black death. Genetic diseases are common amongst closed groups like you mentioned, where they marry almost exclusively with each other. I think a jewish diaspora rooted back to the time of the Roman Empire is something like that. Even if they have genetically higher IQ, which I doubt, I don’t think that this extra 10-15 IQ in average makes the difference between dozens of geniuses and something average. From my perspective it might have contributed to the phenomenon if it is really true, but I think Hungarian math education, talent promotion and education amongst family members had the major role. Even nowadays Hungarian math education is more or less ok, at least in top highschools certainly. In the long run it may be destroyed to be more EU conform… https://blogs.ams.org/matheducation/2015/01/10/the-hungarian-approach-and-how-it-fits-the-american-educational-landscape/ Budapest is the capital of Hungary, so I think it is obvious, that the most educated people concentrated there just like nowadays. Those people had the opportunity to teach their children too. As far as I know in the family of Theodore von Kármán always the older sibling taught the younger one and the father taught only the oldest one. So it is not just about school education, but it is about the education inside the family too. You mentioned that Neumann was well educated too before going to school and I think that was common amongst relative rich citizens. The high schools you mentioned are the sign of a good talent promotion system. We have different top schools nowadays like Fazekas, but I think we managed to preserve that talent promotion system. So in theory even nowadays we could give some Neumanns, Tellers and Kármáns to the world (or I could mention here Tesla too), but times are different. Hungary was always relative poor compared to Western Europe and things got even worse after losing WW1 and 72% of the area with it containing most of our natural resources. https://www.quora.com/Did-Romania-steal-Transylvania-from-Hungary/answer/George-Bajor So I guess the governments after WW1 intentionally invested into human resource, because we barely had anything else left. That was a fine move, we had great engineers and scientists with smart solutions. They knew how to do things with limited resources. Some of them were talented jews, which is not surprising with 25% jewish population as you mentioned. When jews fled because of the nazis to the USA, they met with an environment with almost unlimited resources and they had the knowledge to exploit it. End of story...
Just a few additional points:
1. Up to this date, scientists of Jewish descent fare prominently in garnering the highest accolades (Nobel price, etc.)
2. Hungarian Jews were disadvantaged until 1867, thus the 1890-1910 generation was only the second to enjoy full rights as citizens.
3. In contrast, an estimated ~ 600 families of the high aristocracy had been in exceptional socio-economic position to excel. How many can we claim in fields of sciences, arts, law??
Could you please fix your Wikipedia link( currently hiding the word and from your writing) here?
OK, not everyone believes in reality. That’s fine. But the article clearly illustrates that non-Jews were part of the mix, yet they were the Jews who excelled beyond the norms, or averages among even the best. They have proved it by achievement demonstrated without any bias or arrogance, or guile. The result: Jewish exceptionalism that is also universally documented across the world in all fields and disciplines—including charity and innovation in all manner of tech, art, medicine, and music. And yes, intelligence has something to do with it, for not all Jews were rich or privileged and not all Jews own a bank.
These facts also recognize the massive contributions of other non-Jewish people I wrote about here:
The Crucifixion of James Watson
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/01/the_crucifixion_of_james_watson.html
However the fact that stands out above all else is the the Jews are a fraction of a percent of the human race.
Moreover, the Jews cited were Hungarians first, Jews second. Fully Hungarian, proud Hungarians, in spite of certain less intelligent groups who may feel they aren’t native Hungarians. And really, don’t belong on that land. In fact, the Jews are more native to Hungary than the Magyars of the Seven Tribes who arrived from the ninth to the later centuries. For the Jews arrived on the heels of Cesar’s armies a millenia earlier. And then mated with the locals, producing more Martians whose descendants studied at Budapest’s gymnasiums!
Sons of Israel in Caesar’s Service: Jewish Soldiers in the Roman Military
https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1P3-1104510251/sons-of-israel-in-caesar-s-service-jewish-soldiers
Another interesting fact are Hungary’s Olympic medalists. Check WIKI. The USA with about 360 million people (counting in undocumented Democrats and recently-arrived Jihadis and child molesters), or 36 times that of Hungary, has won approximately 2200 medals. China with a population of 1.5 billion and a population hundreds of times that of Hungary has garnered 600 medals.
Hungary with a population of ten million has won 500 medals, making that nation in aggregate the tenth top winner, and per capita, arguably number one.
The only ending to this story I’m left with is an appropriate slogan: MAKE HUNGARY GREAT AGAIN!
And with Israeli and American cooperation, we will.
Thanks for the article. You captured a few points well, but I think you went into the rabbit hole with others.
Like any unbelievable story, it was a superposition (just to use some physics jargon) of many factors. I collected a few below, definitely not exhaustive, but I hope I captured the main ones.
1. Budapest was actually a metropolis and melting pot in the second half of the XIX. century
2. These scientists had world-class education (in Hungary and in Germany/Switzerland)
3. Emigration to the US that has become a superpower in the XX. century
1. Historical background / Budapest, the melting pot
Let’s put this into context. Hungary was occupied by the Osman empire from the mid 16th till the end of 17th century. The Habsburgs helped to kick out the Turks so Hungary became a part of the Habsburg empire (no Austria-Hungary yet). Both politically and economically undeveloped: feudal system, agriculture heavy, little industry. The Habsburg empire was archaic compared to Britain or even France and Hungary was less developed than the (current day) Austrian or Czech territories. In the 19th century the feudal system started to break up, the Hungarian noble class wanted more autonomy, but the Hungarian revolution of 1948⁄49 was beaten. However, the Austrian empire was defeated by Prussia in 1866 and Austria realised that it needed to change tack (it gave up its aspiration to lead the German unification). In 1867 the so called Austro-Hungarian Compromise was signed. Lot of details, 2 important points here: 1. Customs union 2. Common Army. The economy boomed in the next c.50 years, and with lower spend on military the government had plenty of extra resources and it spent the money wisely.
A, Education reform of 1868:
Hungary introduced a Prussian-style “volkschule” system in 1868 (compulsory for both boys and girls between age 6-12 and free, at least for the poor. FYI: At this time, neither France nor Britain had such a broad coverage.)
In the next decades the country spent enormous amounts on education. (I have no official data, but Hungary spent >10% of the GDP on education. Certain sources claim in the range of 20-25%. Remember, there was no modern health care or pension system at this time) Training teachers became a focus (20 colleges were established in the country to train teachers) and teachers were paid very well, it was a prestigious profession. Laszlo Ratz was a key figure, but not the only one. (Daniel Arany, Sandor Mikola, Jozsef Kurschak, etc)
The curriculum was revised to make it fit for the modern times (introduction of “real” schools that focused on sciences, e.g. students did not need to learn Latin or Greek)
When you have good and motivated teachers, other innovations follow e.g. math papers for high school students country-wide, math competitions, etc. These competitions not just trained the talented youngsters, but also connected them.
http://www.komal.hu/info/miazakomal.e.shtml http://www.batmath.it/matematica/raccolte_es/ek_competitions/ek_competitions.pdf
B, Budapest, the economic hub
Vienna was the political centre of Austria-Hungary, Budapest “got” the role of the business capital. First, Budapest was kind of detested by Vienna, like okay, you can have the less glamorous business role, but Budapest ran with the opportunity. It became an economic and trading hub attracting people not just from Austria-Hungary, but from all over Europe.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/asdj7h/europes_largest_cities_by_population_in_1900/
C, Second industrial revolution—electricity
As I wrote above, Hungary was much less developed then even the Austrian or Czech territories (even around 1900, GDP/capita was c.50% higher in “Austria”, 2x in Germany and 3x in Britain https://brilliantmaps.com/europe-in-gdp-per-capita-1890/ ), but Budapest managed to ride the electricity boom, its companies and inventors played an important role. These were the high-tech companies of the time, imagine like the headquarters of Taiwan Semiconductor or Salesforce would be in Budapest. Just a few examples:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganz_Works
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tungsram
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivadar_Pusk%C3%A1s
Nikola Tesla worked for Puskas before he moved to the US. There were some other remarkable scientists and engineers working for Ganz and Tungsram. (see the Key people section on Wikipedia)
The 3rd oldest underground in the world (first 2 in Britain) is in Budapest and its construction was an engineering miracle that time, it took less than 2 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_Line_M1_(Budapest_Metro)
Sidenote: In 1867 legal equality was granted to the Jews (emancipation). This opened the door to their rise in social ranks. The timing was perfect. C. 5% of the Hungarian population was Jewish, but they were overrepresented in cities as they did not own land (the primary source of income and wealth in the feudalistic times). education was their way to rise and they used their talents to help to build out the budding capitalist system and the industrial sector. Given the economic boom, c.25% of Budapest population was Jewish by 1900.
2. Education
Hungary had a great, if not world-class, primary and secondary education system then (see above) and some of these scientists had private tutors from a very young age. The Hungarian universities were not world-class though, the best were in Germany. (At this time, the scientific epicentre was Germany, even the “language of physics” was German). These scientists came from upper middle class or wealthy families, so they could afford to go to university in Germany (or Switzerland). They did not just learn the most recent achievements of science from the greatest minds of the era (Neumann’s doctoral advisor was the great David Hilbert, Teller’s was Heisenberg!), but also studied and worked together with probably the most talented students of the time.
I think having a Jewish background played a role here. Even though they were wealthy, they were not part of the noble class, so they could not expect a cushy, well-paid office job in the government, etc, so they brought the maximum out of their talents. E.g. Both Teller and Wigner enrolled into the Budapest University of Technology (the most prestigious institution in Hungary) but they soon realised that it was not good enough for them and went to study in Germany.
Also relevant, that all of these guys were interested in theoretical fields (physics and maths), but their fathers pushed them to study chemical engineering so that they can make a good living. They obliged, but this did not discourage them to study their primary interests, earning a second degree in math/physics. Imagine how broad their knowledge was!
I do not believe in the Jews have / had higher IQs argument, I believe it was more of a nurture thing. The Jewish population was mostly urban and education was their best way to rise. They needed to figure out ways to make money, they did not have land to plough on.
3. Emigration to the US
Austria-Hungary lost in World War I, the empire dissolved, Hungary lost a large part of its territory. The number one objective of the country was to challenge the Peace Treaty. The country became extremely nationalistic, Hungary aligned behind Germany. Anti-Semitism intensified in the 1920s and particularly in the 1930s.
For these Jewish scientists (even if some of them were secular) the best option was to emigrate to the US. Europe was too dangerous and the US invested in science and it was a much more open society. (Although these guys remained outsiders nonetheless).
In the US they worked with the brightest of the era again in a country that had close to unlimited resources. And seeing the events in Europe made them paranoid (who wouldn’t have been?!), propelling them to work even harder. (The Einstein-Szilard letter was Szilard’s idea, because he was concerned that if the Germans invade Belgium they could access uranium in larger amounts from Belgian Congo)
This was an interesting read. There were two steps in this reasoning that really tripped me up, though. The first to me seems to be a flaw. The second, I’d love to see more info on.
1) you seem very quick to dismiss the factor of “Jewish culture,” without giving it the same inspection as any other theory. Ashkenazi Jewish culture is definitely not the same as Sephardi Jewish culture (or any other type), so just noting that this effect seems to be primarily Ashkenazi isn’t enough to invalidate the theory. Not to mention the other factors you bring up later about how regions associated with Ashkenazi Jews were the main ones really fostering enough Jewish wealth and development to be conducive to this kind of academic intelligence. And the simple fact that Ashkenazim make up 80% of the worlds Jews would account for this effect skewing Ashkenazi. (Not sure if the numbers were different during the period in question, but I figure probably similar— Ashkenazim are often discussed as the large majority). And the remainder are not mostly Sephardi. More are Mizrahi (Jews who stayed in the Middle East and North Africa), a group which did not have remotely the same opportunities to go into academia as the European Jews.
In quick support of culture as a theory, Judaism overall is a religion which encourages far more doubt/questioning than many other religions, especially Christianity. It’s not exactly shocking that for a religion like Christianity, where doubt is sin or originates with the devil, the skepticism necessary for good research might not come as naturally. Conversely, in a culture where rabbis spend hundreds of years debating minutiae just for the sake of debating and a regular practice of studying Torah is to try to find interesting patterns or loopholes or alternate interpretations just to see things from all angles, careers in research might seem appealing. Plus, there may be an argument to be made about how a religion where faith tends to be a little less central compared to Christianity might encourage better thinkers. Or about what kinds of work ethics are valued in different religious cultures, though it starts to get a little messy and circular at this point.
Plus, there is other evidence of religious culture as educational choices and wealth even when the genetic factor doesn’t serve as an appropriate alternative theory. The whole “Protestant work ethic” is highly controversial and probably not worth considering as it’s own theory, but there are some more promising studies which seem to indicate interesting differences between educational outcomes for women of different religious groups (the focus on women is because of the theory that women are much more significantly impacted by religious norms due to religious gender roles). This study shows both high Jewish performance and high “Liberal and Eastern Religions,” (clarified to be the rather broad category of UU, agnostics, Buddhists, etc) which share some of the cultural points I mentioned above. It also delves into a few more cultural explanations for other differences observed. This example is a bit crude and doesn’t have the ideal methodology for eliminating other factors, but it and others like it seem to point to something cultural that we’d be failing to appropriately consider if we dismissed culture so incredibly quickly as irrelevant. I haven’t done a deep dive into the research here, but at bare minimum it seems to be more than nothing and worth thinking about for a few moments longer than it takes to say “but we don’t see this in Sephardim so it’s not cultural.”
The genetic points are certainly interesting, but the cultural theory ought to be given proper consideration too.
2) Do no other genetic diseases which impair people physically but not mentally have the effect of increased IQ? It seems intuitive to me that people with certain types of physical impairment would seek out more cognitive careers to ensure financial stability as very little else would be readily available to them. It seems similarly intuitive that physical impairment leaves people to focus more on their mental and intellectual pursuits. Higher IQ would correlate with these efforts. But I’m absolutely no expert. Very quick google search showed a correlation between gout and high IQ, which as far as I know is not associated with Jews. But if someone has more clarity on this I would appreciate it!
Hi Scott,
First of all, thanks for the article. It’s a great demonstration of how thorough investigation can falsify myths of simplistic explanation, such as attributing the creation of great minds to a single teacher or educational institution.
I do have some hypothesis regarding this topic:
1. Luck: Such extraordinary minds as Teller, Neumann and Wigner are produced by chance. We were just lucky that we got so many in that era and we are just fooled by randomness and our eagerness to find causal relationship everywhere.
2. Easier problems: I do not know much about contemporary physics, so I am probably wrong on this one, yet I think it shall be mentioned: These great minds were not as extraordinary as we believe. We have comparable people even nowadays, Teller’s generation produced more results due to “low hanging fruits”: the problems they solved were easier than the problems that remained, hence the lack of such great breakthroughs in contemporary physics.
3. Akrasia: As you mentioned, even before starting their formal education, these people were already extraordinary. Probably due to them being the first generation where their families could afford to have them study instead of contributing to their income. But hey, this is still true for subsequent generations! So why do we not have such great minds? I think this is due to circumstances talented kids in that era were raised: If smart kids wanted to entertain their minds the only thing they could do was studying complicated subjects. They had no TV, comic books, fantasy or science fiction, reddit, mmorpgs or social networks. They had nothing that would drain their attention so they could focus all their time and energy in mastering math, physics and other like subjects. In addition, as they already did this for fun when they were young, even later in their life they could easily focus on these as they did not attribute this activity to be “work” but something they were happy to do.
3.2 This all could have been enhanced by living in a community where being highly educated was a display of great social status, so their families were be motivated to spend a great fortune of tutors, books and to encourage the children.
I must admit, I did not research properly that era, so my assumptions might be wrong.
I think it’s possible the nutritional diet improved during this time as well. Additional vitamins and minerals at critical developmental stages are shown to be a standard deviation above average. https://www.adelaide.edu.au/news/news55161.html Another aspect in regards to the genetic diseases is that those sphingolipid issues involves electric signaling. Imagine a copper wire without a protective sheath. Not only does the signal degrade, it’s also slower. https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/myelin-a-specialized-membrane-for-cell-communication-14367205/ A healthy, richer diet could finally take advantage of the Jewish overly abundant myelin development. Leading to literally faster thinking: https://www.npr.org/2009/03/20/102169531/smart-people-really-do-think-faster#:~:text=The%20smarter%20the%20person%2C%20the%20faster%20information%20zips%20around%20the,participants%20took%20standard%20IQ%20tests.
Thank you for this article! I really enjoyed it!
Please include a bibliography. Or just links and names to things you have read, anything really. Thanks!
I just realized the links are included in the text.