Book Note

István Hargittai. The Martians of Science: Five Physicists Who Changed the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. xiv + 313 pp. $34.50.

Reviewed by George B. Kauffman

This fascinating and informative book relates the lives and achievements of Theodore von Kármán, Leo Szilard, Eugene P. Wigner, John von Neumann, and Edward Teller. These five brilliant Budapest-born, Europe-educated, Jewish physicists emigrated to the United States, where they contributed to some of the 20th century’s most significant developments in theoretical and applied science. Called “Martians” by some American colleagues because of their shared foreign language and their extraordinary scientific brilliance, they were all politically active during and after World War II. Their scientific and political power was far reaching, influencing the rise of American military research and dominance in the 20th century and touching everyone from Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer to Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. Budapest-born István Hargittai, a prolific Jewish physical chemist, has drawn on his personal relationships with the Martians, their families, and their contemporaries, as well as the primary and secondary literature, to tell a story of great scientific, historical, and human interest that had previously gone untold.