He left Hungary for the last time in 1926 upon receiving an invitation to return to Berlin to work as an assistant to the well-known physical chemist R. Becker. "The whole of
quantum physics was being created within my own eyesight," he said of physics in Germany during the 1920s, as quoted in
Pioneers of Science: Nobel Prize Winners in Physics. Inspired by such inventiveness, Wigner began writing papers of his own; specifically, he was interested in exploring how the mathematical concept known as
group theory could be used as a tool in the new quantum
mechanics. On the strength of this work, Wigner was invited in 1927 to join the physics department of the University of G¨ottingen, as assistant to the mathematician
David Hilbert.
At G¨ottingen Wigner developed his law of the conservation of parity , which states that no fundamental distinction can be made between left and right in physics. The laws of physics are the same in a right-handed system of coordinates as they are in a left-handed system. Based on Wigner's law of parity conservation, particles emitted during a physical interaction should emanate from the nucleus to the right and the left in equal numbers.
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