Wigner, Eugene (1902–1995), physicist.Born and reared in a Hungarian‐Jewish milieu that included three other great scientists— Edward
Teller, John
von Neumann, and Leo Szilard (1898–1964)—Eugene Wigner was a brilliant theoretical physicist and first‐rate engineer who advanced the study of physics in ways various and profound. In the late 1920s, Wigner laid the groundwork for the theory of symmetries in quantum mechanics. In the 1930s, he showed that the essential properties of nuclei, including the behavior of protons and neutrons, follow the well‐known symmetries of the laws of motion.
Trained largely in Germany, Wigner emigrated to the United States in 1933 as Adolf Hitler came to power in that country, invited by Princeton University. In 1939, with Szilard and Teller, he was part of a small group of scientists who persuaded Albert
Einstein to alert President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt that nuclear chain reaction could produce an atomic bomb of almost unimaginable power. During
World War II, while working on the
Manhattan Project in the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago, Wigner helped produce such a bomb. Bent on defeating Nazi Germany, Wigner worked on plutonium production and made superb engineering designs for the air‐cooled atomic pile built by the DuPont Corporation.
For his work on the mechanics of nuclear protons and neutrons, and for his symmetry principles of nuclear particles, Wigner shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics. In the 1960s, he staunchly advocated national
civil‐defense programs. Becoming more philosophical in his later years, Wigner explored the paradox of consciousness, the unnatural quality of fame, and the mystery of life itself.
See also
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Atomic Bombing of;
Nuclear Weapons;
Physical Sciences;
Science: From 1914 to 1945;
Science: Since 1945.
Bibliography
Eugene P. Wigner and and Andrew Szanton , The Recollections of Eugene P. Wigner, 1992.
Andrew Szanton
