World of Scientific Discovery on Eugene Paul Wigner
Eugene Paul Wigner was born in Budapest, Austria-Hungary (now Hungary) on November 17, 1902. A year after receiving a doctorate in chemical engineering from the Technische Hochschule in Berlin in 1925, Wigner received an invitation to work as an assistant to the well-known physical chemist R. Becker. Inspired by Becker, Wigner began writing papers of his own, 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 Göttingen, as an assistant to the mathematician David Hilbert.
At Göttingen, 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. This theory remained steadfast until 1956 when two Chinese-American physicists, Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang, disproved it under certain circumstances.
Wigner returned in 1928 to the Technische Hochschule and continued his work on group theory until 1930, when he moved to the United States to accept a position as lecturer in mathematical physics at Princeton University. For eight years he served as a part-time professor at Princeton, until he was elevated to the position of Thomas D. Jones Professor of Mathematical Physics in 1938. Wigner's tenure at Princeton afforded him the time and space to do his most important work. As a young physicist, he had become interested in symmetry principles, especially with the patterns found in atomic and molecular spectra. Important discoveries in the 1930s of the binding forces within a nucleus paved the way for Wigner's research. One significant result was his forecast of an optical spectra based on the long periodicity model. His findings were published in one of the first papers on the subject. Wigner also contributed significantly to the understanding of short periodicity in his application of mathematical group theory to the energy levels of nuclei up to atomic weight 50. His book on group theory has become a classic in the physics canon.
In 1933, the year after James Chadwick discovered the neutron, Wigner composed a paper that postulated the existence of an energy state of the deuteron which differed from the ground state that had been observed. Wigner's theory provided an explanation for a hitherto unaccounted-for phenomenon: the large deflections of slow neutrons when they pass close to protons. Although Wigner discounted the idea's importance and did not deem it worthy of publication, it proved to be the foundation for numerous other papers.
In 1936, while working with Gregory Breit, Wigner examined the phenomenon of neutron absorption by a compound nucleus. Continuing his work around atomic nuclei, Wigner postulated in 1937 that protons and neutrons were analogous to isotopes in the periodic table of the elements. The manifestation of a particle as a proton or as a neutron could be accounted for by different degrees of spin on the particle, known as isotopic spin or isospin for short.
Turning his attention to nuclear fission in 1938, Wigner developed a number of theoretical techniques of reactor calculations, some of which formed the basis of the first controlled chain reaction carried out by the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi. Together with his fellow Hungarians, Leo Szilard and Edward Teller, Wigner persuaded Albert Einstein to send a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt urging him to beat Hitler in the race to develop an atom bomb. The letter was crucial in convincing the American government to build nuclear reactors and was also directly responsible for the establishment of the Manhattan Project, on which Wigner played a key role.
The outbreak of war in Europe caused Wigner to turn his full attention to nuclear physics. At the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago, he began work on the Manhattan Project as the chief engineer of the water-cooled Hanford plutonium reactors. Wigner's colleagues observed that, for a theorist, he had a remarkably precise knowledge of the engineering design of reactors. After the war, Wigner accepted a position as director of research and development at the Clinton Laboratories at Oak Ridge from 1946 to 1947.
Wigner's many contributions to physics have been recognized in a variety of prizes and honorary degrees. Most significantly, in 1936, Wigner won the Nobel physics prize for his contribution to the theory of atomic nuclei elementary particles, especially for his discovery and application of fundamental principles of symmetry.
In 1941, Wigner married Mary Annette Wheeler, with whom he had two children, David and Martha. His second marriage, to Eileen Hamilton, produced a daughter, Erika. Wigner died in Princeton, New Jersey, on January 1, 1995, of pneumonia. He was 92.
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