Eugene Wigner

Eugene Wigner is one of a generation of physicists of the 1920s who remade the world of physics. It was a collection of men from Berlin to London to Zurich to Pisa, though not quite yet to New York or Chicago. The first physicists in this new generation--Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger, and Paul Dirac, to name three--created quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics was a dazzling new world, which threw open dozens of fundamental physical questions. A new set of men (and a few women) came along behind them, to answer the first questions and pose others, often more complex.

Eugene Wigner was in this second set of physicists. He posed and answered some of the most profound questions of 20th century physics. He laid the foundation for the theory of symmetries in quantum mechanics. In the late 1930's, he extended his research into atomic nuclei.

Between 1939-1945, this generation of physicists helped to remake the world again. This time it was a far greater, more public world they remade: one of armies, peoples, ideologies. They did it first by seeing that an atomic bomb could be built, and then by arguing that it must be built, in the United States, immediately; and finally by playing the crucial role in getting the bomb built, under terrible pressure.

Eugene Wigner was a giant of atomic bomb production as well.

Wigner was one of a remarkable quartet of Jewish-Hungarian scientists from turn-of-the-century Budapest. The other three were Edward Teller, Johnny Von Neumann, and Leo Szilard. All four knew of each other as children. Szilard was probably Wigner's best adult friend. Von Neumann was a schoolmate and mentor. Wigner was the only one of the four to win a Nobel Prize.

A more peaceful, modest man you could not find, but Dr. Wigner was deeply affronted by Adolf Hitler and saw how dangerous he was almost from the day Hitler took power. Wigner built the atomic bomb to defend the world against Hitler and was sorry to see it used against the Japanese.

Nevertheless, he remained a stolid defender of the U.S. military, a patriot in his adopted country.

In 1992, at the age of 90, he published a fine memoir, The Recollections of Eugene P. Wigner. He died a year later. His thought became more philosophical as he aged, and on the last page of his memoir, Dr. Wigner wrote: "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."

/Talk