Wigner Jenő Pál was born inBudapest,Austria-Hungary on November 17, 1902, to middle classJewish parents, Elisabeth Elsa Einhorn and Antal Anton Wigner, a leather tanner. He had an elder sister, Berta, known as Biri, and a younger sister Margit, known as Manci,[2] who later married British theoretical physicistPaul Dirac.[3] He was home schooled by a professional teacher until the age of nine, when he started school at the third grade. During this period, Wigner developed an interest in mathematical problems.[4] At the age of 11, Wigner contracted what his doctors believed to betuberculosis. His parents sent him to live for six weeks in asanatorium in the Austrian mountains, before the doctors concluded that the diagnosis was mistaken.[5]
Wigner's family was Jewish, but not religiously observant, and hisBar Mitzvah was a secular one. From 1915 through 1919, he studied at the secondary grammar school calledFasori Evangélikus Gimnázium, the school his father had attended. Religious education was compulsory, and he attended classes inJudaism taught by a rabbi.[6] A fellow student wasJános von Neumann, who was a year behind Wigner. They both benefited from the instruction of the noted mathematics teacherLászló Rátz.[7] In 1919, to escape theBéla Kuncommunist regime, the Wigner family briefly fled to Austria, returning toHungary after Kun's downfall.[8] Partly as a reaction to the prominence of Jews in the Kun regime, the family converted toLutheranism.[9] Wigner explained later in his life that his family decision to convert to Lutheranism "was not at heart a religious decision but an anti-communist one".[9]
Wigner received a request fromArnold Sommerfeld to work at theUniversity of Göttingen as an assistant to the great mathematicianDavid Hilbert. This proved a disappointment, as the aged Hilbert's abilities were failing, and his interests had shifted to logic. Wigner nonetheless studied independently.[16] He laid the foundation for the theory of symmetries in quantum mechanics and in 1927 introduced what is now known as theWigner D-matrix.[17] Wigner andHermann Weyl were responsible for introducing group theory into quantum mechanics. The latter had written a standard text,Group Theory and Quantum Mechanics (1928), but it was not easy to understand, especially for younger physicists. Wigner'sGroup Theory and Its Application to the Quantum Mechanics of Atomic Spectra (1931) made group theory accessible to a wider audience.[18]
Jucys diagram for the Wigner6-j symbol. The plus sign on the nodes indicates an anticlockwise reading of its surrounding lines. Due to its symmetries, there are many ways in which the diagram can be drawn. An equivalent configuration can be created by taking its mirror image and thus changing the pluses to minuses.
In the late 1930s, Wigner extended his research into atomic nuclei. By 1929, his papers were drawing notice in the world of physics. In 1930,Princeton University recruited Wigner for a one-year lectureship, at 7 times the salary that he had been drawing in Europe. Princeton recruited von Neumann at the same time. Jenő Pál Wigner and János von Neumann had collaborated on three papers together in 1928 and two in 1929. They anglicized their first names to "Eugene" and "John", respectively.[22] When their year was up, Princeton offered a five-year contract as visiting professors for half the year. The Technische Hochschule responded with a teaching assignment for the other half of the year. This was very timely, since theNazis soon rose to power in Germany.[23] At Princeton in 1934, Wigner introduced his sister Margit "Manci" Wigner to the physicistPaul Dirac, with whom she remarried.[24]
Princeton did not rehire Wigner when his contract ran out in 1936.[25] ThroughGregory Breit, Wigner found new employment at theUniversity of Wisconsin. There, he met his first wife, Amelia Frank, who was a physics student there. However, she died unexpectedly in 1937, leaving Wigner distraught. He therefore accepted an offer in 1938 from Princeton to return there.[26] Wigner became anaturalized citizen of the United States on January 8, 1937, and he brought his parents to the United States.[27]
Although he was a professed political amateur, on August 2, 1939, he participated in a meeting withLeó Szilárd andAlbert Einstein that resulted in theEinstein–Szilárd letter, which prompted PresidentFranklin D. Roosevelt to authorize the creation of theAdvisory Committee on Uranium with the purpose of investigating the feasibility ofatomic bombs.[28] Wigner was afraid that theGerman nuclear weapon project would develop an atomic bomb first, and even refused to have his fingerprints taken because they could be used to track him down if Germany won.[29] "Thoughts of being murdered," he later recalled, "focus your mind wonderfully."[29]
On June 4, 1941, Wigner married his second wife, Mary Annette Wheeler, a professor of physics atVassar College, who had completed her Ph.D. atYale University in 1932. After the war she taught physics on the faculty ofRutgers University'sDouglass College in New Jersey until her retirement in 1964. They remained married until her death in November 1977.[30][31] They had two children, David Wigner and Martha Wigner Upton.[32]
TheChiantifiasco purchased by Wigner to help celebrate the first self-sustaining, controlled chain reaction. It was signed by the participants.
Wigner was disappointed thatDuPont was given responsibility for the detailed design of the reactors, not just their construction. He threatened to resign in February 1943, but was talked out of it by the head of theMetallurgical Laboratory,Arthur Compton, who sent him on vacation instead. As it turned out, a design decision by DuPont to give the reactor additional load tubes for more uranium saved the project whenneutron poisoning became a problem.[35] Without the additional tubes, the reactor could have been run at 35% power until the boron impurities in the graphite were burned up and enough plutonium produced to run the reactor at full power; but this would have set the project back a year.[36] During the 1950s, he would even work for DuPont on theSavannah River Site.[35] Wigner did not regret working on the bomb,[37] remarking:[38]
In fact, my regret is that it was not done sooner. If we had begun trying seriously to control fission in 1939, we might have had an atomic bomb by the Winter of 1943-1944. At that time Stalin's army was still bottled up in Stalingrad. By the middle of 1945, when we first used the bomb, they had already overrun much of Central Europe. The Yalta Conference would have produced a document much less favourable to Russia, and even Communist China might have been set back. So I do not regret helping to build the bomb.
An important discovery Wigner made during the project was theWigner effect. This is a swelling of the graphite moderator caused by the displacement of atoms byneutron radiation.[39] The Wigner effect was a serious problem for the reactors at theHanford Site in the immediate post-war period, and resulted in production cutbacks and a reactor being shut down entirely.[40] It was eventually discovered that it could be overcome by controlled heating and annealing.[41]
Through Manhattan project funding, Wigner andLeonard Eisenbud also developed an important general approach to nuclear reactions, the Wigner–Eisenbud R-matrix theory, which was published in 1947.[42]
Wigner was elected to theAmerican Philosophical Society in 1944 and the United StatesNational Academy of Sciences in 1945.[43][44] He accepted a position as the director of research and development at the Clinton Laboratory (now theOak Ridge National Laboratory) inOak Ridge, Tennessee in early 1946. Because he did not want to be involved in administrative duties, he became co-director of the laboratory, with James Lum handling the administrative chores as executive director.[45] When the newly createdAtomic Energy Commission (AEC) took charge of the laboratory's operations at the start of 1947, Wigner feared that many of the technical decisions would be made in Washington.[46] He also saw the Army's continuation of wartime security policies at the laboratory as a "meddlesome oversight", interfering with research.[47] One such incident occurred in March 1947, when the AEC discovered that Wigner's scientists were conducting experiments with acritical mass ofuranium-235 when the director of the Manhattan Project,Major GeneralLeslie R. Groves, Jr., had forbidden such experiments in August 1946 after the death ofLouis Slotin at theLos Alamos Laboratory. Wigner argued that Groves's order had been superseded, but was forced to terminate the experiments, which were completely different from the one that killed Slotin.[48]
Feeling unsuited to a managerial role in such an environment, he left Oak Ridge in 1947 and returned to Princeton University,[49] although he maintained a consulting role with the facility for many years.[46] In the postwar period, he served on a number of government bodies, including theNational Bureau of Standards from 1947 to 1951, the mathematics panel of theNational Research Council from 1951 to 1954, the physics panel of theNational Science Foundation, and the influential General Advisory Committee of theAtomic Energy Commission from 1952 to 1957 and again from 1959 to 1964.[50] He also contributed tocivil defense.[51]
Near the end of his life, Wigner's thoughts turned more philosophical. In 1960, he published a now classic article on the philosophy of mathematics and of physics, which has become his best-known work outside technical mathematics and physics, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences".[53] 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.[53] His original paper has provoked and inspired many responses across a wide range of disciplines. These includedRichard Hamming in Computer Science,[54]Arthur Lesk in Molecular Biology,[55]Peter Norvig in data mining,[56]Max Tegmark in Physics,[57]Ivor Grattan-Guinness in Mathematics,[58] andVela Velupillai in Economics.[59]
Turning to philosophical questions about the theory of quantum mechanics, Wigner developed a thought experiment (later calledWigner's Friend paradox) to illustrate his belief that consciousness is foundational to thequantum mechanical measurement process. He thereby followed an ontological approach that sets human's consciousness at the center: "All that quantum mechanics purports to provide are probability connections between subsequent impressions (also called 'apperceptions') of the consciousness".[60]
Measurements are understood as the interactions which create the impressions in our consciousness (and as a result modify the wave function of the "measured" physical system), an idea which has been called the "consciousness causes collapse" interpretation.
Hugh Everett III (a student of Wigner's) discussedWigner's thought experiment in the introductory part of his 1957 dissertation as an "amusing, butextremely hypothetical drama".[61] In an early draft of Everett's work, one also finds a drawing of the Wigner's Friend situation,[62] which must be seen as the first evidence on paper of the thought experiment that was later assigned to be Wigner's. This suggests that Everett must at least have discussed the problem together with Wigner.
In November 1963, Wigner called for the allocation of 10% of the national defense budget to be spent onnuclear blast shelters and survival resources, arguing that such an expenditure would be less costly than disarmament. Wigner considered a recentWoods Hole study's conclusion that a nuclear strike would kill 20% of Americans to be a very modest projection and that the country could recover from such an attack more quickly than Germany had recovered from the devastation of World War II.[63]
After his retirement from Princeton in 1971, Wigner prepared the first edition of Symmetries and Reflections, a collection of philosophical essays, and became more involved in international and political meetings; around this time he became a leader[75] and vocal defender[76] of theUnification Church's annualInternational Conference on the Unity of the Sciences.
Mary died in November 1977. In 1979, Wigner married his third wife, Eileen Clare-Patton (Pat) Hamilton (1915-2010), the widow of physicist Donald Ross Hamilton, the dean of the graduate school at Princeton University, who had died in 1972.[77] In 1992, at the age of 90, he published his memoirs,The Recollections of Eugene P. Wigner withAndrew Szanton. In it, 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."[78] In his collection of essays 'Philosophical Reflections and Syntheses' (1995), he commented: "It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness."[79]
1959.Group Theory and its Application to the Quantum Mechanics of Atomic Spectra. New York: Academic Press. Translation by J. J. Griffin of 1931,Gruppentheorie und ihre Anwendungen auf die Quantenmechanik der Atomspektren, Vieweg Verlag, Braunschweig.
1970Symmetries and Reflections: Scientific Essays. Indiana University Press, BloomingtonISBN0-262-73021-9
^Mehra, Jagdish (1993). "Eugene Paul Wigner: A Biographical Sketch".The Collected Works of Eugene Paul Wigner, Part A, Volume I. Springer. p. 12.ISBN978-3-642-08154-5.
The original paper isWigner, E. P.; Eisenbud, L. (1 July 1947). "Higher Angular Momenta and Long Range Interaction in Resonance Reactions".Physical Review.72 (1):29–41.Bibcode:1947PhRv...72...29W.doi:10.1103/PhysRev.72.29.
^Lesk, A. M. (2000). "The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in molecular biology".The Mathematical Intelligencer.22 (2):28–37.doi:10.1007/BF03025372.S2CID120102813.
^Grattan-Guinness, I. (2008). "Solving Wigner's mystery: The reasonable (though perhaps limited) effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences".The Mathematical Intelligencer.30 (3):7–17.doi:10.1007/BF02985373.S2CID123174309.
Wigner, E. P. (1931).Gruppentheorie und ihre Anwendung auf die Quanten mechanik der Atomspektren (in German). Braunschweig, Germany: Friedrich Vieweg und Sohn.ASINB000K1MPEI.
Wigner, E. P. (1959).Group Theory and its Application to the Quantum Mechanics of Atomic Spectra. translation from German by J. J. Griffin. New York: Academic Press.ISBN978-0-12-750550-3.
Wigner, E. P.;Weinberg, Alvin M. (1992).The collected works of Eugene Paul Wigner, Volume 5, Part A, Nuclear energy. Berlin: Springer.ISBN978-0-387-55343-6.
Wigner, Eugene Paul; Mehra, Jagdish; Wightman, A. S. (1995).Volume 7, Part B, Philosophical Reflections and Syntheses. Berlin: Springer.ISBN978-3-540-63372-3.
Interview with Eugene P. Wigner on John von Neumann at theCharles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis – Wigner talks about his association withJohn von Neumann during their school years in Hungary, their graduate studies in Berlin, and their appointments to Princeton in 1930. Wigner discusses von Neumann's contributions to the theory of quantum mechanics, Wigner's own work in this area, and von Neumann's interest in the application of theory to the atomic bomb project.
.jpg)
