Szia!
Köszönöm a levelet! Meg a nyelvi portált is, már kapom a francia leveleket,
meg várom a japán beindulását. :)
A cikket valszeg nem lehet egészében felrakni sehova sem. Ahhoz Nature
engedélye kell. Legfeljebb idézni lehet bleőle, annak meg nem nagyon van
értelme.
Keresem a megoldást.
Berci
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ádám " <adam.78(a)uze.net>
To: <wikihu-l(a)mail.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Sunday, July 09, 2006 10:04 PM
Subject: [Wikihu-l] A Nature 2001. januári cikke a XX. századot formáló
magyarokról
Genius loci
Vaclav Smil
SUMMARY: The twentieth century was made in Budapest.
The ancient Romans had a term for it -- genius loci -- and history is not
short of astounding, seemingly inexplicable concatenations of creative
talent. Florence in the first decade of the sixteenth century is perhaps the
unmatched example: anyone idling on the Piazza della Signoria for a few days
could have bumped into Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo and
Botticelli. Other well-known efflorescences of artistic creativity include
Joseph II's Vienna in the 1780s, where one could have met C. W. Gluck, Haydn
and Mozart in the same room. Or, eleven decades later, in fin de siecle
Paris one could read the most recent instalment of Émile Zola's
Rougon-Macquart cycle, before seeing Claude Monet's latest canvases from
Giverny, and then strolling along to a performance of Claude Debussy's
Prélude a l'apres-midi d'un faune in the evening. But it is not just today's
young adults -- who probably view Silicon Valley as the centre of the
creative world -- who would be unaware that an improbable number of
scientific greats were born in Budapest in the decade between 1898 and 1908.
Between them, this group were responsible for some of the twentieth
century's most decisive scientific advances and, consequently, some of its
fundamental strategic and political transformations. Leo Szilard, a
physicist who both studied and worked with Einstein and who, together with
Enrico Fermi, patented the first nuclear fission reactor, was born there in
1898. In the summer of 1939, Szilard and Eugene Wigner, born in the city in
1902, persuaded Einstein to sign the famous letter to President Franklin
Roosevelt that led to the Manhattan Project. Dennis Gabor, whose research
ranged from pioneering work in holography to nuclear fusion, was born in
1900, and John von Neumann three years later. Von Neumann's prodigious feats
of problem-solving during the Second World War -- prefigured by his ability
to divide eight-digit numbers in his head at the age of six -- have been
overshadowed by his postwar conception of the stored computer program, the
prototypical architecture of modern computers (although when told in 1954 of
the idea for FORTRAN, he asked: "Why would you want more than machine
language?"). Edward Teller, born in 1908, is the only living member of this
group. His fame will always rest on his contribution to the design of
America's first thermonuclear weapon, and on his later advocacy of
antiballistic missile defences. By pushing the time frame back a bit, and by
admitting bright intellects from beyond physics, the Budapest circle must be
enlarged -- to mention just its most prominent overachievers -- by Theodore
von Kármán (1881-1963), a pioneer in aerodynamics and aeronautics whose
studies of fluid flows helped to open the era of fast subsonic and
supersonic flight; by Albert Szent-Györgi (1893-1986), who, after isolating
ascorbic acid (for which he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology for 1937),
went on to identify actin and myosin, the proteins responsible for muscle
contraction; by Michael Polanyi (1891-1976), who was not just an outstanding
physical chemist but also an accomplished economist and philosopher; and by
Arthur Koestler (1905-83), a brilliant writer and one of the most incisive
chroniclers of the great political and scientific upheavals of the twentieth
century. Besides their birthplace, these men had a number of other things in
common. Most of them came from the city's German-speaking Jewish families,
but Szent-Györgi was born to a rich land-owning family and Gabor's father
was the director of a mining company. All of them left their birthplace to
attend university either in Germany (mostly Berlin and Karlsruhe) or at
Zurich's ETH. And all of them ended up either in the United States or the
United Kingdom. But the differences among them are no less remarkable. Three
of the group-- Szent-Györgi in 1937, Wigner in 1963 and Gabor in 1971 -- got
Nobel prizes. Szilard, with his myriad of interests, never settled in one
place, and his fundamental contributions to modern science are not generally
appreciated. Von Kármán, von Neumann and Teller contributed much to the
United States' rise to postwar strategic dominance. No single fact can
explain this phenomenon. Budapest was not the only city in the
Austro-Hungarian empire brimming with creativity at this time. In the decade
before the First World War, intellects such as Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler
and the physicist Ernst Mach worked in Vienna. Meanwhile, Franz Kafka, the
painter Alfons Mucha and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke were in Prague, where,
in 1911-12, Einstein was developing his general theory of relativity. A
number of factors that von Neumann identified as being behind the Budapest
phenomenon were present in the other two cities: a multicultural
environment, external pressure to succeed, "a feeling of extreme insecurity
in the individuals, and the necessity to produce the unusual or else face
extinction". But, in the end, only the Budapest group made such an
improbable -- and incomparable -- mark on history. Blue streak:
Turn-of-the-century Budapest produced a plethora of great minds, especially
in physics.
Nature 409, 21-21 (04 Jan 2001) Millennium Essay
Forrás: Nature 409, 21-21 (04 Jan 2001) Millennium Essay
Jó lenne felrakni pl. a Wikisource-ba, de a szöveget sajnos csak
töredékenként lehet kinyerni a Nature (
www.nature.com) honlapjának
keresőjéből -- én is úgy rakosgattam össze. Egészében véve valószínűleg nem
használható fel szabadon. (A cikkre egyébként Palló Gábornak "A magyar
tudós-zsenik" c. Mindentudás Egyeteme-beli előadása nyomán kerestem rá.)
Szent-Györgyi nevét végig rosszul írták. Ha mégis ki lehet rakni valahova
legálisan, akkor ezt majd javítani kéne.
Ádám
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