Eugene Paul "E. P." Wigner (Hungarian: Wigner
Jenő Pál; November 17, 1902 – January
1, 1995) was a Hungarian-American theoretical
physicist, engineer 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".A graduate
of the Technical University of Berlin, Wigner
worked as an assistant to Karl Weissenberg
and Richard Becker at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute
in Berlin, and David Hilbert at the University
of Göttingen. Wigner and Hermann Weyl were
responsible for introducing group theory into
physics, particularly the theory of symmetry
in physics. Along the way he performed ground-breaking
work in pure mathematics, in which he authored
a number of mathematical theorems. In particular,
Wigner's theorem is a cornerstone in the mathematical
formulation of quantum mechanics. He is also
known for his research into the structure
of the atomic nucleus. In 1930, Princeton
University recruited Wigner, along with John
von Neumann, and he moved to the United States.
Wigner participated in a meeting with Leo
Szilard and Albert Einstein that resulted
in the Einstein-Szilard letter, which prompted
President Franklin D. Roosevelt to initiate
the Manhattan Project to develop atomic bombs.
Wigner was afraid that the German nuclear
weapon project would develop an atomic bomb
first. During the Manhattan Project, he led
a team whose task was to design nuclear reactors
to convert uranium into weapons grade plutonium.
At the time, reactors existed only on paper,
and no reactor had yet gone critical. Wigner
was disappointed that DuPont was given responsibility
for the detailed design of the reactors, not
just their construction. He became Director
of Research and Development at the Clinton
Laboratory (now the Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
in early 1946, but became frustrated with
bureaucratic interference by the Atomic Energy
Commission, and returned to Princeton.
In the postwar period he served on a number
of government bodies, including the National
Bureau of Standards from 1947 to 1951, the
mathematics panel of the National Research
Council from 1951 to 1954, the physics panel
of the National Science Foundation, and the
influential General Advisory Committee of
the Atomic Energy Commission from 1952 to
1957 and again from 1959 to 1964. In later
life, he became more philosophical, and published
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics
in the Natural Sciences, his best-known work
outside technical mathematics and physics.
== Early life ==
Wigner Jenő Pál was born in Budapest, Austria-Hungary
on November 17, 1902, to middle class Jewish
parents, Elisabeth (Einhorn) and Anthony Wigner,
a leather tanner. He had an older sister,
Bertha, known as Biri, and a younger sister
Margit, known as Manci, who later married
British theoretical physicist Paul Dirac.
He was home schooled by a professional teacher
until the age of 9, when he started school
at the third grade. During this period, Wigner
developed an interest in mathematical problems.
At the age of 11, Wigner contracted what his
doctors believed to be tuberculosis. His parents
sent him to live for six weeks in a sanatorium
in the Austrian mountains, before the doctors
concluded that the diagnosis was mistaken.Wigner's
family was Jewish, but not religiously observant,
and his Bar Mitzvah was a secular one. From
1915 through 1919, he studied at the secondary
grammar school called Fasori Evangélikus
Gimnázium, the school his father had attended.
Religious education was compulsory, and he
attended classes in Judaism taught by a rabbi.
A fellow student was János von Neumann, who
was a year behind Wigner. They both benefited
from the instruction of the noted mathematics
teacher László Rátz. In 1919, to escape
the Béla Kun communist regime, the Wigner
family briefly fled to Austria, returning
to Hungary after Kun's downfall. Partly as
a reaction to the prominence of Jews in the
Kun regime, the family converted to Lutheranism.
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". On religious views,
Wigner was an atheist.After graduating from
the secondary school in 1920, Wigner enrolled
at the Budapest University of Technical Sciences,
known as the Műegyetem. He was not happy
with the courses on offer, and in 1921 enrolled
at the Technische Hochschule Berlin (now Technical
University of Berlin), where he studied chemical
engineering. 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
the 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 the Fritz
Haber Institute), and there he met Michael
Polanyi, who became, after László Rátz,
Wigner's greatest teacher. Polanyi supervised
Wigner's DSc thesis, Bildung und Zerfall von
Molekülen ("Formation and Decay of Molecules").
== Middle years ==
Wigner returned to Budapest, where he went
to work at his father's tannery, but in 1926,
he accepted an offer from Karl Weissenberg
at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin.
Weissenberg wanted someone to assist him with
his work on x-ray crystallography, and Polanyi
had recommended Wigner. After six months as
Weissenberg's assistant, Wigner went to work
for Richard Becker for two semesters. Wigner
explored quantum mechanics, studying the work
of Erwin Schrödinger. He also delved into
the group theory of Ferdinand Frobenius and
Eduard Ritter von Weber.Wigner received a
request from Arnold Sommerfeld to work at
the University of Göttingen as an assistant
to the great mathematician David Hilbert.
This proved a disappointment, as the aged
Hilbert's abilities were failing, and his
interests had shifted to logic. 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. Wigner and Hermann 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's
Group Theory and Its Application to the Quantum
Mechanics of Atomic Spectra (1931) made group
theory accessible to a wider audience.
In these works, Wigner laid the foundation
for the theory of symmetries in quantum mechanics.
Wigner's theorem proved by Wigner in 1931,
is a cornerstone of the mathematical formulation
of quantum mechanics. The theorem specifies
how physical symmetries such as rotations,
translations, and CPT symmetry are represented
on the Hilbert space of states. According
to the theorem, any symmetry transformation
is represented by a linear and unitary or
antilinear and antiunitary transformation
of Hilbert space. The representation of a
symmetry group on a Hilbert space is either
an ordinary representation or a projective
representation.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. 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 the Nazis soon rose to power in Germany.
At Princeton in 1934, Wigner introduced his
sister Manci to the physicist Paul Dirac,
whom she married.Princeton did not rehire
Wigner when his contract ran out in 1936.
Through Gregory Breit, Wigner found new employment
at the University 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 a 1938 offer from Princeton to return
there. Wigner became a naturalized citizen
of the United States on January 8, 1937, and
he brought his parents to the United States.
== Manhattan Project ==
Although he was a professed political amateur,
on August 2, 1939, he participated in a meeting
with Leó Szilárd and Albert Einstein that
resulted in the Einstein–Szilárd letter,
which prompted President Franklin D. Roosevelt
to initiate the Manhattan Project to develop
atomic bombs. Wigner was afraid that the German
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. "Thoughts of being
murdered," he later recalled, "focus your
mind wonderfully."On June 4, 1941, Wigner
married his second wife, Mary Annette Wheeler,
a professor of physics at Vassar College,
who had completed her Ph.D. at Yale University
in 1932. After the war she taught physics
on the faculty of Rutgers University's Douglass
College in New Jersey until her retirement
in 1964. They remained married until her death
in November 1977. They had two children, David
Wigner and Martha Wigner Upton.During the
Manhattan Project, Wigner led a team that
included Alvin M. Weinberg, Katharine Way,
Gale Young and Edward Creutz. The group's
task was to design the production nuclear
reactors that would convert uranium into weapons
grade plutonium. At the time, reactors existed
only on paper, and no reactor had yet gone
critical. In July 1942, Wigner chose a conservative
100 MW design, with a graphite neutron moderator
and water cooling. Wigner was present at a
converted rackets court under the stands at
the University of Chicago's abandoned Stagg
Field on December 2, 1942, when the world's
first atomic reactor, Chicago Pile One (CP-1)
achieved a controlled nuclear chain reaction.
Wigner was disappointed that DuPont 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 the
Metallurgical 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 when neutron poisoning became
a problem. 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. During the
1950s, he would even work for DuPont on the
Savannah River Site. Wigner did not regret
working on the Manhattan Project, and sometimes
wished the atomic bomb had been ready a year
earlier.An important discovery Wigner made
during the project was the Wigner effect.
This is a swelling of the graphite moderator
caused by the displacement of atoms by neutron
radiation. The Wigner effect was a serious
problem for the reactors at the Hanford Site
in the immediate post-war period, and resulted
in production cutbacks and a reactor being
shut down entirely. It was eventually discovered
that it could be overcome by controlled heating
and annealing.Through Manhattan project funding,
Wigner and Leonard Eisenbud also developed
an important general approach to nuclear reactions,
the Wigner–Eisenbud R-matrix theory, which
was published in 1947.
== Later years ==
Wigner accepted a position as the Director
of Research and Development at the Clinton
Laboratory (now the Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
in Oak 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. When the newly
created Atomic 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.
He also saw the Army's continuation of wartime
security policies at the laboratory as a "meddlesome
oversight", interfering with research. One
such incident occurred in March 1947, when
the AEC discovered that Wigner's scientists
were conducting experiments with a critical
mass of uranium-235 when the Director of the
Manhattan Project, Major General Leslie R.
Groves, Jr., had forbidden such experiments
in August 1946 after the death of Louis Slotin
at the Los 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.Feeling unsuited to a managerial
role in such an environment, he left Oak Ridge
in 1947 and returned to Princeton University,
although he maintained a consulting role with
the facility for many years. In the postwar
period he served on a number of government
bodies, including the National Bureau of Standards
from 1947 to 1951, the mathematics panel of
the National Research Council from 1951 to
1954, the physics panel of the National Science
Foundation, and the influential General Advisory
Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission
from 1952 to 1957 and again from 1959 to 1964.
He also contributed to civil defense.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". 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 original paper has provoked
and inspired many responses across a wide
range of disciplines. These included Richard
Hamming in Computer Science, Arthur Lesk in
Molecular Biology, Peter Norvig in data mining,
Max Tegmark in Physics, Ivor Grattan-Guinness
in Mathematics, and Vela Velupillai in Economics.Wigner
was awarded 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". The prize
was shared that year, with the other half
of the award divided between Maria Goeppert-Mayer
and J. Hans D. Jensen. Wigner professed that
he had never considered the possibility that
this might occur, and added: "I never expected
to get my name in the newspapers without doing
something wicked." He also won the Franklin
Medal in 1950, the Enrico Fermi award in 1958,
the Atoms for Peace Award in 1959, the Max
Planck Medal in 1961, the National Medal of
Science in 1969, the Albert Einstein Award
in 1972, and the eponymous Wigner Medal in
1978. In 1968 he gave the Josiah Willard Gibbs
lecture.Mary died in November 1977. In 1979,
Wigner married his third wife, Eileen Clare-Patton
(Pat) Hamilton, the widow of physicist Donald
Ross Hamilton, the Dean of the Graduate School
at Princeton University, who had died in 1972.
In 1992, at the age of 90, he published his
memoirs, The Recollections of Eugene P. Wigner
with Andrew 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."
In his collection of essays Symmetries and
Reflections – Scientific Essays (1995),
he commented: "It was not possible to formulate
the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent
way without reference to consciousness."Wigner
died of pneumonia at the University Medical
Center in Princeton, New Jersey on 1 January
1995. He was survived by his wife Eileen (died
2010) and children Erika, David and Martha,
and his sisters Bertha and Margit.
== Publications ==
1958 (with Alvin M. Weinberg). Physical Theory
of Neutron Chain Reactors University of Chicago
Press. ISBN 0-226-88517-8
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.
1970 Symmetries and Reflections: Scientific
Essays. Indiana University Press, Bloomington
ISBN 0-262-73021-9
1992 (as told to Andrew Szanton). The Recollections
of Eugene P. Wigner. Plenum. ISBN 0-306-44326-0
1995 (with Jagdish Mehra and Arthur S. Wightman,
eds.). Philosophical Reflections and Syntheses.
Springer, Berlin ISBN 3-540-63372-3
== See also ==
List of things named after Eugene Wigner
=== Selected contributions ===
Theoretical physics
MathematicsGabor–Wigner transform
Modified Wigner distribution function
Wigner distribution function
Wigner semicircle distribution
Wigner rotation
Wigner quasi-probability distribution
Wigner semicircle distribution
6-j symbol
9-j symbol
Wigner 3-j symbols
Wigner–İnönü group contraction
Wigner surmise
== Notes ==
== References ==
Hewlett, Richard G.; Duncan, Francis (1969).
Atomic Shield, 1947–1952 (PDF). A History
of the United States Atomic Energy Commission.
University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania
State University Press. ISBN 978-0-520-07187-2.
OCLC 3717478. Retrieved 7 March 2015.
Johnson, Leland; Schaffer, Daniel (1994).
Oak Ridge National Laboratory: the first fifty
years. Knoxville: University of Tennessee
Press. ISBN 978-0-87049-853-4.
Rhodes, Richard (1995). Dark Sun: The Making
of the Hydrogen Bomb. New York: Simon & Schuster.
ISBN 978-0-684-80400-2.
Szanton, Andrew (1992). The Recollections
of Eugene P. Wigner. Plenum. ISBN 978-0-306-44326-8.
Wigner, E. P. (1931). Gruppentheorie und ihre
Anwendung auf die Quanten mechanik der Atomspektren
(in German). Braunschweig, Germany: Friedrich
Vieweg und Sohn. ASIN B000K1MPEI.
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. ISBN 978-0-12-750550-3.
Wigner, E. P.; Weinberg, Alvin M. (1992).
The collected works of Eugene Paul Wigner,
Volume 5, Part A, Nuclear energy. Berlin:
Springer. ISBN 978-0-387-55343-6.
Wigner, Eugene Paul; Mehra, Jagdish; Wightman,
A. S. (1995). Volume 7, Part B, Philosophical
Reflections and Syntheses. Berlin: Springer.
ISBN 978-3-540-63372-3.
== External links ==
1964 Audio Interview with Eugene Wigner by
Stephane Groueff Voices of the Manhattan Project
O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Eugene
Wigner", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive,
University of St Andrews.
Eugene Wigner at the Mathematics Genealogy
Project
EPW contributions to the theory of the atomic
nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly
through the discovery and application of fundamental
symmetry principles at the Wayback Machine
(archived July 9, 2011)
1984 interview with Wigner, in: The Princeton
University Mathematics Community in the 1930s.
at the Wayback Machine (archived October 5,
2012)
Oral history interview transcript with Eugene
Wigner 21 November 1963, American Institute
of Physics, Niels Bohr Library & Archives
at the Wayback Machine (archived October 1,
2013)
Archived March 26, 2015, at the Wayback Machine.
Wigner Jenö Iskolás Évei by Radnai Gyula,
ELTE, Fizikai Szemle 2007/2 – 62.o. (Hungarian).
Description of the childhood and especially
of the school-years in Budapest, with some
interesting photos too.
Interview with Eugene P. Wigner on John von
Neumann at the Charles Babbage Institute,
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis – Wigner
talks about his association with John 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.
Works by or about Eugene Wigner at Internet
Archive
