WIGNER, Eugene Paul

(b. 17 November 1902 in Budapest, Hungary; d. 1 January 1995 in Princeton, New Jersey), Hungarian-American professor of mathematical physics and recipient of the 1963 Nobel Prize in physics for his pioneering work in quantum mechanics.

Wigner, born JenóPál Wigner, was the second of three children and the only son of Anthony Antal Wigner, a leather-tanning factory director, and Elizabeth Erzsébet Einhorn, a housewife. Doctors incorrectly diagnosed a childhood illness as tuberculosis. While Wigner was recuperating in a sanatorium, he pondered mathematics problems. "I had to lie on a deck chair for days on end, and I worked terribly hard on constructing a triangle if the three altitudes are given," he later said. Wigner attended Lutheran High School, Budapest (1915–1920), and met the Hungarian-born mathematician and mathematical physicist John von Neumann who, he said, "was a much better mathematician than I was and a better scientist. But I knew more physics." He enrolled at Technische Hochschule, Berlin, in chemical engineering, studying physics and mathematics during his spare time. He also attended colloquia at the University of Berlin with the physicists Albert Einstein and Max Planck.

In 1925 Wigner obtained his doctorate under fellow Hungarian Michael Polyani, a physical chemist, economist, and philosopher. Wigner was invited back to Technische Hochschule as an assistant professor in the physics department. He immigrated to the United States in 1930, joined the faculty at Princeton University, and devoted himself to the study of atoms and their applications. He was naturalized as an American citizen in 1937. From 1935 to 1937 he taught at the University of Wisconsin and then returned to Princeton, where he spent the remainder of his career. He was named Thomas B. Jones Professor of Mathematical Physics in 1938 and emeritus professor in 1971. During his years at Princeton, he also spent time at the University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory and directed a civil defense project for the National Academy of Sciences (1963) and a similar project for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (1964–1965).

Wigner's 1933 statement "The problem of modern physics is now: What is the structure of the nucleus?" indicated his serious interest in atomic particles. He helped develop the first nuclear reactors and the first nuclear bomb. For his detailed design of the reactors, Wigner was called "the first nuclear engineer." At a National Academy of Sciences award ceremony in Washington, D.C., on 18 May 1960, Chairman James R. Killian, Jr., said, "The trustees believe the development of the nuclear reactor is one of the great advances in man's capability for using atomic energy for peaceful purposes."

One of Wigner's favorite sayings was "The optimist regards the future as uncertain." At times, however, he was not an optimist. As an early refugee from Nazi Germany, he worried, during the late 1930s, that the United States did not take Hitler seriously enough. Later he worried about Stalin's aims in the Soviet Union. During the 1950s he seemed certain that nuclear war was imminent. In 1939 Wigner advised Einstein to warn President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the threat of the Nazi's nuclear weapons. In 1941 Roosevelt established the University of Chicago Manhattan Project to construct an atomic bomb. Wigner worked on that project (1942–1945) and was Director of Research and Development at Clinton Laboratories (1946–1947).

At Princeton, Wigner developed the ideas that eventually resulted in his receiving the 1963 Nobel Prize in physics. His Nobel lecture on December 12—" Events, Laws of Nature, and Invariance Principles"—was a discussion of the general role of symmetry and invariance in modern and classical physics. Wigner supported his thesis that the laws of nature form the raw material in all natural sciences and said that the success of physics was its explanation of the regularities of nature. Wigner's Nobel Prize was representative of the 1960s' emphasis on quantum mechanics and its focus on the study of the microcosm.

During debates on the Princeton campus over the American incursion into Laos, Wigner argued that scientists should be advisers to the government. Others believed that scientists should rise above the political fray and keep themselves separate from political ends. Wigner, however, believed in a strong civil defense, and many liberals of the 1960s saw his outlook as outdated and bleak. Politically, he was a conservative, and he was accused of being a hardliner on the war in Vietnam. Hostile faculty and students attacked his views in 1969. Generally, however, his priority was physics, and he was largely divorced from social issues. Wigner's name was synonymous with scientific discovery: the Wigner-Eckart theorem in group theory; the Wigner coefficients in the quantum theory of angular momentum; the Wigner effect, the Wigner correlation energy, and the Wigner crystal in solids; the Wigner force and the Breit-Wigner formula in nuclear physics; and the Wigner distribution in quantum chaos. What Wigner called his "precious field" was the application of fundamental principles of symmetry in physics.

He coauthored numerous books on nuclear reactors and nuclear structure, including more than five hundred papers published in eight volumes. Official recognition for his nuclear research included the U.S. Medal for Merit (1946); the Enrico Fermi Prize (1958); and the Atoms for Peace Award for 1959, shared with fellow scientist Leo Szilard. Wigner also received the Franklin Medal (1950), the Max Planck Medal of the German Physical Society (1961), the George Washington Award of the American-Hungarian Studies Foundation (1964), the Semmelweiss Medal of the American-Hungarian Medical Association (1965), and the National Medal of Science (1969), among others. He received honorary degrees from more than twenty colleges and universities in the United States and Europe. Wigner was a member of the General Advisory Committee to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission from 1952 to 1957, was reappointed in 1959, and served until 1964.

Wigner married Amelia Zipora Franck, also a physicist, on 23 December 1936. She died tragically in 1937, a few months after their marriage. Four years later, on 4 June 1941 he married Mary Annette Wheeler, a professor of physics at Vassar College. They had a son and a daughter. Following Mary's death from cancer in 1977, Wigner married Eileen C. P. Hamilton in 1979 and became stepfather to her child. In an article written by Erich Vogt for Physics Today (December 1995), Wigner was described as "always genuinely solicitous of people's feelings.… It was essentially impossible to follow him through any door."

In 1960 Wigner said, "The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious." He gave extensive interviews, but he remained as elusive as his subject matter. Dr. Abraham Pais, a fellow physicist, wrote, "He was a very strange man and one of the giants of twentieth-century physics." Wigner helped build the edifice of quantum mechanics. During an interview with the editor Andrew Szanton, he shared his belief in the duty of physics "to provide a living picture of our world, to uncover relations between natural events, and to offer us the full unity, beauty and natural grandeur of the physical world."

Wigner's memoir is The Recollections of Eugene P. Wigner, as told to Andrew Szanton (1992). For a biography, see F. S. Wagner, Eugene P. Wigner: An Architect of the Atomic Age (1981). Tyler Wasson, ed., Nobel Prize Winners (1987), provides chronological details of Wigner's career. See also "Eugene Wigner—A Tribute on His Seventieth Birthday," Physics Today (Oct. 1972); "A Conversation with Eugene Wigner," Science (10 Aug. 1973); "Bargmann and Wigner Honored," Physics Today (Nov. 1978); "Eugene Paul Wigner: A Towering Figure of Modern Physics," Physics Today (Dec. 1995); "Eugene Wigner (1902–1995)," Nature (26 Jan. 1995); and "Symmetry in Physics: Wigner's Legacy," Physics Today (Dec. 1995). An obituary is in the New York Times (4 Jan. 1995).

Sandra Redmond Peters