Eugene Paul "E.P." Wigner (Hungarian Wigner Pál Jenő) (November 17, 1902 – January 1, 1995) was a Hungarian physicist and mathematician.

He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 "for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles". Some contemporaries referred to Wigner as the Silent Genius and some even considered him the intellectual equal to Albert Einstein, though without his prominence. Wigner is important for having laid the foundation for the theory of symmetries in quantum mechanics as well as for his research into atomic nuclei, and for his several theorems.

Early life

Wigner was born in Budapest, Hungary (Austria-Hungary) to a middle class Jewish family. At age 11, Wigner contracted what his parents believed was tuberculosis. They sent him for six weeks to a sanitarium in the Austrian mountains. During this period, Wigner began to develop an interest in mathematical problems. From 1915 till 1919, concurrently with John von Neumann, Wigner studied at the Lutheran Fasori Evangélikus Gimnázium where they both greatly benefited from encouragement by the legendary mathematics teacher László Rátz. In 1919, to escape the Bela Kun Communist regime, the family briefly moved to Austria, returning after Kun's downfall. Partly as a reaction to the prominence of Jews in the Kun regime, the family converted to Lutheranism.

In 1921, Wigner studied chemical engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin (today the Technische Universität Berlin). He also attended the Wednesday afternoon colloquia of the German Physical Society. These colloquia featured such luminaries as Max Planck, Max von Laue, Rudolf Ladenburg, Werner Heisenberg, Walther Nernst, Wolfgang Pauli, and Albert Einstein. Wigner also met physicist Leó Szilárd, who at once became Wigner's closest friend. A third experience in Berlin was formative. Wigner worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry (now Fritz Haber Institute), and there met Michael Polanyi, who became, after László Rátz, Wigner's greatest teacher.

Middle years

In the late 1920s, Wigner deeply explored the field of quantum mechanics. A period at Göttingen as an assistant to the great mathematician David Hilbert proved a disappointment, as Hilbert was no longer active in his works. Wigner nonetheless studied independently. He laid the foundation for the theory of symmetries in quantum mechanics and in 1927 introduced what is now known as the Wigner D-matrix. It is safe to state that he and Hermann Weyl carry the whole responsibility for the introduction of group theory into quantum mechanics (they spread the "Gruppenpest"). See Wigner's 1931 monograph for a survey of his work on group theory. In the late 1930s, he extended his research into atomic nuclei. He developed an important general theory of nuclear reactions (see for instance the Wigner-Eckart theorem). By 1929, his papers were drawing notice in the physics world. In 1930, Princeton University recruited Wigner, which was timely as the Nazis soon came to power in Germany. In Princeton in 1934 Wigner introduced his sister Manci to the physicist Paul Dirac, whom she married.

In 1936, Princeton did not rehire Wigner, so he moved to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There he met his first wife, a physics student named Amelia Frank. She died in 1937, leaving Wigner distraught. On January 8, 1937, Wigner became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Princeton University shortly invited Wigner back, and he rejoined its faculty in the fall of 1938. Though a professed political amateur, in 1939 and 1940 Wigner played a major role in agitating for the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bomb. However, he was by personal preference a pacifist. He later contributed to civil defense in the U.S. In 1946, Wigner accepted a job as director of research and development at Clinton Laboratory (now Oak Ridge National Laboratory) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. When this did not work out especially well, Wigner returned to Princeton.

In 1941 Wigner married his second wife, Professor Mary Annette Wheeler, of Vassar College. Professor Wheeler was also a physicist, with a Ph.D. from Yale in 1932. They were married until her death in 1977 and had two children.

In a 1987 appreciation of Professor Wigner, Alvin M. Weinberg stated: "…this trait of Wigner’s [giving credit to his young collaborators] explains why so much, not only of reactor theory but of theoretical physics from 1930 to 1965 — though it may not bear Wigner’s name — actually has origin in a suggestion made or question asked by Professor Wigner."

Last years

In 1960, Wigner gave a thought-provoking insight into the power of mathematics in his best-known essay outside physics, now a classic paper, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences. He argued that biology and cognition could be the origin of physical concepts, as we humans perceive them, and that the happy coincidence that mathematics and physics were so well matched, seemed to be "unreasonable" and hard to explain. Even so, he found resistance to this theory, notably by distinguished mathematician Andrew M. Gleason. In 1963, Wigner received the Nobel Prize in Physics. He professed never to have even considered the possibility that this might occur, and added: "I never expected to get my name in the newspapers without doing something wicked." He later won the Enrico Fermi award, and the National Medal of Science. In 1992, at the age of 90, he published a memoir, The Recollections of Eugene P. Wigner with Andrew Szanton. Wigner died three years later in Princeton. One of his significant students was Abner Shimony.

Wigner was asked in the late 1970s "Do you remember Rátz?" (one of his early teachers). He answered: "There he is!" and pointed to a picture of Rátz on his office wall.

His third wife was Patricia Hamilton Wigner, widow of another physicist, Donald Ross Hamilton, retired Dean of the Graduate School at Princeton University who passed away in 1971.

Near the end of his life his thought turned more philosophical. In his memoir, Wigner said: "The full meaning of life, the collective meaning of all human desires, is fundamentally a mystery beyond our grasp. As a young man, I chafed at this state of affairs. But by now I have made peace with it. I even feel a certain honor to be associated with such a mystery." He became interested in the Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism, particularly its ideas of the universe as an all pervading consciousness In his collection of essays Symmetries and Reflections - Scientific Essays, he commented "It was not possible to formulate the laws (of quantum theory) in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness."

Wigner also conceived the Wigner's friend thought experiment, which is an extension of the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment. The Wigner's friend experiment asks the question: at what stage does a "measurement" take place? Wigner designed the experiment to highlight how he believed consciousness is necessary to the quantum mechanical measurement process.

Wigner was a committee chairman at Unification Church founder Sun Myung Moon's annual International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences (ICUS) for several years. At the 11th ICUS conference in Philadelphia, he was given the Founder's Award "for his outstanding contributions to science.

See also

• Wigner semicircle distribution
• Wigner quasi-probability distribution
• Particle physics and representation theory
• Wigner effect
• Wigner-Seitz cell
• Wigner D-matrix
• 3-jm symbol

Wigner Honored

• Enrico Fermi Award
• Wigner Feloowship Program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).
• Walli, Ron. "Auditorium at ORNL Renamed in Honor of Eugene P. Wigner" ORNL Press Release, (Jan. 11, 1996).
• Eugene P. Wigner Reactor Physicist Award at the American Nuclear Society.

Publications

• Wigner, E. P., Creutz, E. C. & R. R. Wilson. "Absorption of Thermal Neutrons in Uranium", Princeton University, United States Department of Energy (through predecessor agency the Atomic Energy Commission), (Sept. 26, 1941).
• Wigner, E. P. "Radioactivity of the Cooling Water", Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago, United States Department of Energy (through predecessor agency the Atomic Energy Commission), (March 1, 1943).
• Wigner, E. P. "Solutions of Boltzmann`s Equation for Mono-energetic Neutrons in an Infinite Homogeneous Medium", Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago, United States Department of Energy (through predecessor agency the Atomic Energy Commission), (Nov. 30, 1943).
• Wigner, E. P., Weinberg, A. M. & J. Stephenson. "Recalculation of the Critical Size and Multiplication Constant of a Homogeneous UO{sub 2} - D{sub 2}O Mixtures", Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago, (Feb. 11, 1944).
• Wigner, E.P. & F.L. Friedman. "On the Boundary Condition Between Two Multiplying Media", Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago, (April 19, 1944).
• Wigner, E. P. & J. E. Wilkins, Jr. "Effect of the Temperature of the Moderator on the Velocity Distribution of Neutrons with Numerical Calculations for H as Moderator", Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), United States Department of Energy (through predecessor agency the Atomic Energy Commission), (Sept. 14, 1944).
• Wigner, E. P. "On the Variation of Eta with Energy in the 100-1000 ev Region", Brookhaven National Laboratory, United States Department of Energy (through predecessor agency the Atomic Energy Commission), (Nov. 1, 1949).
• Wigner, E. P. "The Magnitude of the Eta Effect", Du Pont de Nemours (E.I.) & Co., United States Department of Energy (through predecessor agency the Atomic Energy Commission), (April 25, 1951).

References

• Alvin M. Weinberg, Eugene P. Wigner Physical Theory of Neutron Chain Reactors (University of Chicago Press, 1958) ISBN 0-226-88517-8
• E. P. Wigner, Gruppentheorie und ihre Anwendungen auf die Quantenmechanik der Atomspektren, Vieweg Verlag, Braunschweig (1931). Translated into English: J. J. Griffin, Group Theory and its Application to the Quantum Mechanics of Atomic Spectra Academic Press, New York (1959).
• Eugene P. Wigner, Symmetries and Reflections: Scientific Essays (MIT Press, 1970) ISBN 0-262-73021-9
• Eugene Paul Wigner as told to Andrew Szanton The Recollections of Eugene P. Wigner (Plenum, 1992) ISBN 0-306-44326-0
• Eugene Paul Wigner, G. G. Emch, Jagdish Mehra (editor), Arthur S. Wightman (editor) Philosophical Reflections and Syntheses (Springer, 1997) ISBN 3-540-63372-3
• E.P. Wigner, On unitary representations of the inhomogeneous Lorentz group, Annals Math.40:149-204,1939

Notes

External links

• Biography and Bibliographic Resources, from the Office of Scientific and Technical Information, United States Department of Energy
• Oral history interview, 12 May 1987. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
• Eugene Wigner Biography
• Nobel Prize Biography
• National Academy of Sciences biography
• his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles
• Annotated bibliography for Eugene Wigner from the Alsos Digital Library
• An interview with Wigner about his experience at Princeton
• Oral history interview transcript with Eugene Wigner 24 January 1981, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library & Archives