lit a candle 8h agoI don't really know what to say here. I'd never heard the name until a clip of him explaining relativity on some Hungarian TV program turned up in my feed last year, and it stuck with me even without the language. 79 years old. I'm sorry for the people who actually understood him.
Their story
Béla Lukács was a Hungarian theoretical physicist and public science communicator whose research spanned relativity and cosmology, and who became a familiar face explaining physics to a general audience on Hungarian television. The HUN-REN Wigner Research Centre for Physics announced that he died on the morning of 6 November 2026,…
Béla Lukács was a Hungarian theoretical physicist and public science communicator whose research spanned relativity and cosmology, and who became a familiar face explaining physics to a general audience on Hungarian television. The HUN-REN Wigner Research Centre for Physics announced that he died on the morning of 6 November 2026, in his 79th year. The cause of death was not made public.
He was born in Budapest on 2 April 1947. From 1970 he worked as a scientific adviser at the Particle and Nuclear Physics Institute of the Central Research Institute for Physics (KFKI), later the Wigner Research Centre for Physics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He became a Doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1988. His early papers treated relativity; in the 1970s and 1980s he also published widely in nuclear and heavy-ion physics. Cosmology remained a central interest: he co-authored papers with György Paál and with students including Bettina Keszthelyi, Tibor Pacher, Zsolt Bagoly and István Horváth. In the early 1990s, years before the 2011 Nobel Prize recognised accelerating expansion, he, Paál and Horváth published results involving a non-zero cosmological constant.
Beyond the journal literature he built a second career as a polymath populariser. He gave many talks in the Mindent Tudás Főiskolája series modelled on the better-known Mindentudás Egyeteme, ranging from the origin of the Hungarian language to genetics, economics and physics. From December 2006 he became a regular guest on ATV's Friderikusz most!, answering Sándor Friderikusz's lay questions in roughly half-hour conversations that introduced viewers to quantum mechanics, black holes, parallel worlds and cosmology. He also appeared on Első Pesti Egyetemi Rádió and in Galileo webcasts on interstellar travel. He served on the Academy's Geonomy Scientific Committee and chaired its material-evolution subcommittee, and left more than a hundred scholarly publications.
His honours included the Academy Youth Prize (1977), the KFKI public-education prize (1980), the Novobátzky Károly Prize (1983), the Academy Physics Prize (1995), the Club of Science Journalists' title of Science Populariser of the Year for 2008 (awarded in 2009), and the Knight's Cross of the Hungarian Order of Merit in 2014. Asteroid 541992 Lukácsbéla is named after him. He was married to Dr Éva Papp.
The Wigner centre's notice of 6 November 2026 remembered him as a physicist and polymath and said his memory would be preserved with reverence. Hungarian Wikipedia and Wikidata recorded the same death date.
Biography adapted from Hungarian Wikipedia Lukács Béla (fizikus) (CC BY-SA 4.0); HUN-REN Wigner Research Centre for Physics death notice (6 November 2026); Wikidata Q1159764.
Photos
1Béla Lukács, 26 February 2012
by People Forever
that clip is from Mindent Tudás Főiskolája, there's a whole series if you look