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Eugene Paul "E. P." Wigner (Hungarian Wigner Jenő Pál; November 17, 1902 – January 1, 1995) was a Hungarian American 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.
[edit] Early lifeWigner 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.[1] 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. [edit] Middle yearsIn 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A period at Göttingen as an assistant to the great mathematician David Hilbert proved a disappointment, as Hilbert was no longer active in his works.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.[2] 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. Her 1937 death left 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 he played a major role in agitating for the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bomb. However, by personal preference he was a pacifist. Wigner was present in a converted squash-racquets court at the University of Chicago's abandoned Stagg Field on Dec. 2, 1942, when the worlds first nuclear reactor, Chicago Pile One (CP-1) went critical.[3] 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, also a physicist, who completed a Yale Ph.D. in 1932. They were married until her 1977 death, and had two children. [edit] Last years In 1960, Wigner published a now classic article on the philosophy of mathematics and of physics, which has become his best-known work outside of technical mathematics and physics, "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. His reasoning was resisted by the Harvard 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. His third wife was Patricia Hamilton Wigner, widow of another physicist, Donald Ross Hamilton, the retired Dean of the Graduate School at Princeton University, who had died 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[2]. 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 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."[4] [edit] Honors
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Categories: 1902 births | 1995 deaths | 20th-century mathematicians | American Jews | American Nobel laureates | Enrico Fermi Award recipients | University of Göttingen faculty | Hungarian immigrants to the United States | Hungarian Jews | Hungarian mathematicians | Hungarian Nobel laureates | Hungarian physicists | Hungarian nuclear physicists | Hungarian Americans | Jewish scientists | National Medal of Science laureates | Naturalized citizens of the United States | Nobel laureates in Physics | Princeton University faculty | Theoretical physicists | University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty | Oak Ridge National Laboratory | Atoms for Peace Award recipients | Burials at Princeton Cemetery | People from Pest | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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