rosta írta:
Ahogy Thaiföldről látják a magyarokat:
http://index.hu/tudomany/mnplg080201/Úgy látszik, most ilyen divat van külföldön.
Ezt az Economist cikket a nővérem küldta Kanadából.
The Economist: Why Hungary has produced so many geniuses
Why Hungary has produced so many geniuses
Jan 22nd 2008
I * spotted a gap in the market in Hungary's booming tourism industry. There are wine tours and eco-holidays, horse-riding and hunting, even pig-killing and sausage festivals. But those with more cerebral interests would surely sign up for a genius tour. For this small central European nation has produced a disproportionate number of geniuses, mainly scientific, but also cultural titans.
The tour could start at the new plaque on the wall of Honved street, around the corner from Parliament. It's a splendid piece of work, a bronze relief of the physicist Edward Teller, set on a sheet of black marble. Teller grew up here, before emigrating to the United States, where he became known as the 'Father of the H-bomb' for his work on the Manhattan Project, and probably also inspired the character of Dr Strangelove in the film of the same name.
From there we would progress to Bajcsy-Zsilinszky street, where another plaque commemorates Janos von Neumann, who worked with Teller, and who also helped developed game theory and computer science. And then to Falk Miksa street, once the home of Denes Gabor, who invented the hologram. We would visit the former homes of Eugene Wigner, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics, and Leo Szilard, who worked with Albert Einstein and also helped develop the A-bomb. Then to Semmelweis University, named for Dr Ignac Semmelweis. In the mid-nineteenth century Semmelweis became known as the 'saviour of mothers' after his discovery that much fewer women died in childbirth if their doctors washed their hands, especially if they had just performed a post-mortem. Common sense today, but revolutionary at the time, and rejected by much of the medical establishment.
As well as A-bombs and holograms, Hungarians * brought the world all manner of inventions, including Laszlo Biro's ballpoint pen, Donat Banki and Janos Csonka's carburettor and Peter Goldmark's LP records. Albert Szent-Gyorgy won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1937 for his work synthesising Vitamin C, extracted from paprika. Two of the greatest film-makers of the twentieth century were Hungarian: Alexander Korda (pictured) and Michael Curtiz. Korda produced "The Third Man", while Curtiz directed "Casablanca". His near namesake, Andre Kertesz, honed the genre of artistic photography, while Endre Friedman, better known as 'Capa', re-invented photo-journalism and landed with the first wave of soldiers on D-Day.
The tour could end on Sziv street, where a plaque commemorates the house where Arthur Koestler once lived. Koestler wrote about his childhood in the city's Sixth District in his autobiography, "Arrow in the Blue". One of his earliest memories was being taken to the dentist, who performed a tonsillectomy on him without anaesthetic. Koestler is now best remembered for "Darkness at Noon", itself a kind of intellectual atom-bomb.
At a time when much of the western European left, and many liberals, still had hazy, naive ideas that somehow the Soviet Union was on the path to building a better society, and that communism remained a good idea even if badly practised, "Darkness at Noon" blew that dream apart, with its harrowing account of the imprisonment and self-debasement of Rubashov, an old Bolshevik.
All of which begs the question, just why does Hungary produce so many scientific and creative geniuses? My own theory: the Hungarian language. Hungarian is one of the world's most difficult languages to learn, as I can personally testify. It is a Finno-Ugric language, part of the Uralic family, which is quite separate to the Indo-European group, unrelated to any other European tongue except Finnish and Estonian, and then only distantly.
There are numerous loan words from German, Turkish, Slavic and even Hebrew slang, but the overall impression is completely baffling. Hungarian is agglutinative, meaning words take innumerable prefixes, suffixes and circumfixes to define their function and direction. There are three degrees of formality, no genders (thankfully, although that can also cause some confusion), but every verb--even the imperative--must be conjugated either definitely or indefinitely.
On top of that, there is rhyming vowel harmony--the rule that all the suffixes piled onto the verb stem must agree with the first syllable. All of this turns young Hungarian brains into super-computers as they rapidly process all the calculations needed just to construct a sentence. After that, nuclear fission is child's play.
EVERY morning on my way to work, I pass what is surely the least-used office in Budapest. It's on the ground floor of a sought-after street downtown, just a few yards from Parliament. But I * never seen a single person go in or out, or even loiter outside. All is explained, I think, by the notice alongside the door. It details the opening hours of the complaints office of Hungary's National Security Office, or secret service (NBH), whose not-very-secret headquarters is around the corner.
One can imagine what kind of complaints the NBH might receive:
Dear NBH: My telephone clicks and there are dodgy-looking men hanging around on my street wearing long raincoats and smoking cigarettes.
Yours sincerely, a concerned citizen.
Or even:
Dear NBH: My telephone does not click, there are no dodgy-looking men hanging around on my street wearing long raincoats, smoking cigarettes. Don't you know who I am?
Hungary's state security services were not always so consumer friendly. The former headquarters of the Stalinist-era secret police, on Andrassy Avenue, is now the Terror House Museum, chronicling the bloody horrors committed during the late 1940s and 1950s. The terror eased off by the early 1960s, but right up until the collapse of communism the secret police kept the one-party system in place by harassing and arresting anyone considered a threat. My friend and colleague Nick Thorpe, of the BBC, has a copy of part of his secret-service file from the late 1980s. It is a tawdry record of telephone taps and surveillance reports, as he meets dangerous subversives such as environmentalists and other foreign journalists.
But Nick was only watched. Harsher measures would * disrupted the feelers that the Hungarians were sending out to the west. As always in Mitteleuropa, the picture was not black and white but shades of grey, according to one intelligence source. My deep throat claims that as the communist bloc split between the hardliners in Czechoslovakia and East Germany on one side and reformists in Hungary and Poland on the other, Hungarian spies kept the reformers up to date on the hard-liners' plans.
They also leaked information in the 1980s about the former Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu's plans to demolish the historic Hungarian villages in Transylvania, triggering an international furore. And they were involved in the 1989 Romanian revolution, he claims, gathering intelligence and passing it onto the revolutionaries. Little wonder, then, that conspiracy-minded Central-Europe-watchers note that the uprising began in Timisoara, just a few miles from the Hungarian border.
Nowadays of course, Hungary is a democracy, and a member of both the European Union and NATO. The NBH has a website and its 2006 annual report (at least the non-classified sections) is available in English. The racy case histories would provide plots for a whole series of thrillers, as Hungary's spooks battle illegally trafficked military technology, cyber-criminals, document fakers and international money-launderers. New threats then, but some old reflexes still persist. Lajos Galambos, the head of the NBH, resigned last year after agents harassed journalists investigating a new villa for Gyorgy Szilvasy, then head of the prime minister's office.
Mr Szilvasy is now minister for the secret services. He replaced Mr Galambos with Sandor Laborc, whose appointment triggered a furore. Mr Laborc studied at the Dzerzhinsky Academy, the KGB training school named for the founder of the Cheka, the Soviet Union's first secret police.
Last November Parliament's National Security Committee split down the middle over Mr Laborc's appointment, with Fidesz MPs arguing that Mr Laborc is a security risk. Fidesz's leader, Viktor Orban, claimed that Russia was now re-activating sleeper agents and networks left dormant since 1990, and Mr Laborc's appointment was part of this, causing apprehension in the United States. Exciting stuff, surely worthy of a chapter or two in the NBH's next annual report.
It's true that the friendship of Hungary's president, Ferenc Gyurcsany, with Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, and Mr Gyurcsany's ambivalent energy policy that seems to tilt Moscow-wards, * caused some concern in the West. So THE ECONOMIST asked several western officials who know about these things about Mr Laborc. They all said Mr Laborc's time in Moscow was a non-issue. The NBH is well regarded, especially for its expertise in the neighbouring Balkans. And how much of a danger to national security can Mr Laborc really be when he once worked for Mr Orban as a senior official for the national tax authority?
Red-baiting is a dangerous tactic in a country where even in the late 1980s the Communist party still boasted around 800,000 loyal members. They included a number of Hungary's now shrillest super-patriots. But then, as the saying goes: "We are a small country; we only * one mob".
Copyright 2008 The Economist
oda megy a pénz ahol érvényesül az akaratunk, effektus!
nekem nem az a főnök diktál!
