CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | Olasz, Csaba István |
|---|---|
| Title | The Interconnectedness of the Social and Natural Sciences: Hungarian Refugee Scientists in Defense of the Autonomy of Science |
| Summary | The contribution of foreign born scientists to the building of the first Atomic bomb is well-known. That a number of theoretical physicist involved in the Manhattan Project continued taking an active part in the politicization of nuclear physics of post war America were also refugees is, perhaps, less so. This essay considers the public engagement of Hungarian born scientists in a broader historical context that has shaped their professional trajectories. Discussing themes as family backgrounds, (forced?) migration, totalitarian systems, personal ambitions, technical brilliance, socio-economic relations of science and government as well as nuclear defense politics, I point out that my protagonists have become agencies in and of the transformation that science politics had been undergoing at the time. The shared experience as Atomic scientists of Eugene Wigner and Leo Szilard is the departure point from which an analysis of personal and socio-political factors is used to interpret any discrepancies in the rationale behind, and the nature of, their public engagement. A chapter is devoted to another Hungarian refugee scholar-scientist at the time living in Manchester, England, who, not unlike his two colleagues across the Atlantic, was also championing the autonomy of science but in a different context, by different means, and to different ends. Michael Polanyi’s case is meant to be invoked to provide an outlook of how his, then nascent, philosophy of science, applied to pushing back against Marxist-materialist science in England, overlaps with Szilard’s efforts to defend the autonomy of science in the American context and whether it has any relevance to Wigner’s conceptions of the relation between science and politics. |
| Supervisor | Hall, Karl |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/olasz_csaba.pdf |
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