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In the mid-1950s, Atoms for Peace provided a crucial boost for the study of nuclear physics in Hungary, a country that fell under Communist rule and Soviet domination after World War II. Several small, insulated centers of nuclear research already existed, but after President Dwight Eisenhower's speech to the United Nations General Assembly on 3 December 1953, calling for the development of Atoms for Peace programs, Hungary's efforts began to grow quickly. In the glow of the moment, with significant support from the government and the ruling Communist party, Hungarian physicists established new research centers, bought and constructed instruments, published specialized books and journals, held conferences, and organized university courses and programs to train experts both at home and in the USSR. These activities constituted a new, vibrant nuclear culture encompassing diverse areas of life (agriculture, medicine, and some parts of industry) and eventually some cooperative links with Western and Soviet-bloc scientific communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early history of surface chemistry, in the 1920s, the nature of gas adsorption was a pivotal subject. A theory created by Michael Polanyi in the peripheral Hungary contradicted the received view originating from the American Irving Langmuir. When working out his theory, Polanyi had not even heard of Langmuir's rival description. However, Polanyi emigrated from Hungary to Germany, the centre of his field, and tried to defend his adsorption theory in the circle of the leading experts, including Einstein and Fritz Haber. This controversy seemed vital to his survival as a scientist and as an immigrant. The aim of this article is to recapitulate this controversy, with its sad undercurrents, the role of local science, methods of argumentation, and the work of a central scientific community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Hungarian radiochemist George Hevesy and his research on radioactivity in Hungary during the 1910s. The author asserts that scientific methodology in the study of radioactivity during the period was based on the scientific legacies evolving from either natural history or experiment-based scientific research, sometimes called Baconian science. Other subjects considered are Hevesy's relationships with other scientists in Hungary, the development of the radioactive tracer method, the first applications of radioactive tracers and indicators, the isotope theory of matter, and radioactivity expert Béla Szilárd.