Eugene Paul Wigner

Eugene Paul Wigner , 1902-95, American physicist, b. Hungary, grad. Technische Hochschule, Berlin, 1925. He was a professor at Princeton Univ. from 1930 to 1936 and again from 1938 to 1971. In 1937 he became a U.S. citizen. During World War II he worked on the Manhattan Project , which resulted in the first atomic bomb. After beginning his association with the Atomic Energy Commission in 1947, he served as a member of its general advisory committee from 1952 to 1957 and from 1959 to 1964. He shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics with U.S. physicist Maria Goeppert-Mayer and German physicist J. H. D. Jensen for work on the structure of the atomic nucleus. Wigner also received other major awards, including the National Science Medal and Atoms for Peace Award.

Wigner, Eugene Paul (1902–95) US physicist, b. Hungary. During World War 2, Wigner worked on the Manhattan Project. He was the first physicist to apply group theory to quantum mechanics. With this technique, he discovered the law of conservation of parity. For his work on the structure of the atomic nucleus, Wigner shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in physics with Hans Jensen and Maria Goeppert-Mayer.

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