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After Heitler and London published their pioneering work on the application of quantum mechanics to chemistry in 1927, it became an almost unquestioned dogma that chemistry would soon disappear as a discipline of its own rights. Reductionism felt victorious in the hope of analytically describing the chemical bond and the structure of molecules. The old quantum theory has already produced a widely applied model for the structure of atoms and the explanation of the periodic system. This paper will show two examples of the entry of quantum physics into more classical fields of chemistry: inorganic chemistry and physical chemistry. Due to their professional networking, George Hevesy and Michael Polanyi found their ways to Niels Bohr and Fritz London, respectively, to cooperate in solving together some problems of classical chemistry. Their works on rare earth elements and adsorption theory throws light to the application of quantum physics outside the reductionist areas. They support the heuristic and persuasive value of quantum thinking in the 1920–1930s. Looking at Polanyi’s later oeuvre, his experience with adsorption theory could be a starting point of his non-justificationist philosophy.

This chapter approaches various occurrences of scientific nationalism in nineteenth-century Hungary; the term ‘scientific nationalism’ stands for both nationalism occurring within science and nationalism based on science. The latter form of nationalism, which used science directly for political purposes as an argument and justification for nationalist politics, had gradually become a widespread ideology in Hungary in the second part of the nineteenth century. It was not science, but politics, that was nationalist; however, science could not stay neutral on this central political issue. It developed a national character manifested both in its institutional structure and in its cognitive contents.

This paper presents a framework for the study of George Hevesy's research in the 1910s by distinguishing two styles of radioactivity research: the analytical (as practices in Manchester and Vienna in some extent) and the natural historical styles (as practiced in Hungary). Georg Hevesy's approach combined the two types. Indeed, by studying Hevesy's research in context, I show that the earliest applications of isotopes were born in parallel with the establishment of the isotope theory of matter.

According to a joke circulating among American scientists around the time of the Second World War, some physicists were discussing the chances of a possible visit to Earth by extraterrestrial beings armed with superior intelligence. One of the physicists, perhaps Enrico Fermi, remarked that the aliens were already among them but they called themselves Hungarians. This joke inspired the title of Istvan Hargittai's book The Martians of Science: Five Physicists who Changed the Twentieth Century, in which, like a modern-day Plutarch, he relates the parallel biographies of five Hungarian scientists who emigrated to the US and played major roles in science and the development of the atomic bomb.