Eugene Wigner

Topic under construction by Courtney Branson 12/1/15

Eugene Wigner was a Hungarian American born in Austria-Hungary in 1902. He received part of the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics due to his work with the theory of the atomic nucleus. He worked with such greats as Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard, and Franklin D. Roosevelt to prepare the United States for the Manhattan Project, a project to build an atomic bomb during World War II.

Personal Life

Early Life

Born in 1902, Wigner had two sisters, Bertha and Margit. He was the son of Elisabeth and Anthony Wigner. He was 9 years old when he became interested in mathematics, which only grew from then. Wigner went to school briefly at the Budapest University of Technical Sciences, but was unhappy there. He studied chemical engineering at Technische Hochschule in Berlin after that, where he met physicist Leo Szilard who then became friends. From then, he accepted jobs working on a variety of projects involving x-ray crystallography and quantum mechanics which started his most notable works.

Family Life

Eugene Wigner married twice. His first wife, Amelia Frank, died unexpectedly in 1937. He later remarried to Mary Annette Wheeler, a physics professor at Vassar College in 1941. They had two children, David and Martha, before she died in 1977. He married again two years later to Eileen Clare-Patton Hamilton and they had one daughter, Erika. Eugene died of pneumonia in 1995.

Scientific Significance

Wigner's work with quantum mechanics lead to the formation of group theory in quantum mechanics. In Group Theory and Its Application to the Quantum Mechanics of Atomic Spectra Wigner described his own theory of symmetry in quantum mechanics, which helped to form the mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics. He then extended his research to apply it to atomic nuclei. He began to work with Princeton in the United States. In 1939, Eugene Wigner participated in a meeting with Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein to write a letter, later called the Einstein-Szilard letter, to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Wigner, scared of Germany creating the first atomic bomb, helped form this letter that convinced the president to begin a project to start the Manhattan Project. In his later years, he turned away from laboratory research and turned philosophical, causing him to write The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences in 1960 which inspired people from a wide range of backgrounds such as computer science, molecular biology, data mining, physics, mathematics, and economics. In 1963, Wigner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics "for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles" (1).

Wigner's work with the mathematical nature of quantum mechanics ultimately led to him winning half of the nobel prize for physics in 1963. The two other winners of the award, Maria Goeppert Mayer and J. Hans D. Jensen, used Wigner's mathematical structure to determine the electron shell model of the nucleus which we still use today.

Manhattan Project

Wigner led a team on this project tasked with designing the production nuclear reactors. These reactors had to convert uranium into plutonium. This would be the first reactor ever actually created. He used a graphite neutron moderator with water cooling. Ultimately, his idea was altered by DuPont, who added more load tubes for the uranium, which ultimately saved the project as neutron poisoning became a problem. Wigner's main contribution to the Manhattan Project became known as the Wigner effect. This caused major setbacks for the Manhattan Project, but was later controlled by annealing and controlling the heating of the reactor. Another important contribution from Wigner that came out of this project was the Wigner-Eisenbud R-matrix theory. This theory, published in 1947, described the appropriate general approach to nuclear reactions that could be used in years to come.

The Wigner Effect

The Wigner effect is when the atom in a solid become displaced due to neutron radiation. This generally happens when neutrons collide with atoms in a crystal structure with enough energy to displace them from the lattice. This is most commonly found in nuclear reactors where energies can get up to 10 MeV, when a mere 25 eV is all thats needed for displacement to begin. This effect can become even more dramatic by causing displacement cascades inside of a matrix, via a series of elastic collisions. The Wigner effect can cause unplanned problems inside of reactors, as the now imperfect lattice structure has energy associated with it. When a large number of these imperfections accumulate, they could release their energy creating a dramatic increase in temperature, which is a risk in reactors with low operating temperatures. Such tragic effects have been seen in the real world, such as with the Windscale fire in Great Britain.

Awards

- Medal for Merit (1946)

- Franklin Medal (1950)

- Enrico Fermi Award (1958)

- Atoms for Peace Award (1959)

- Max Planck Medal (1961)

- Nobel Prize in Physics (1963)

- National Medal of Science (1969)

- Albert Einstein Award (1972)

- Wigner medal (1978)

Famous Quotes

- "It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand too."

- "I never expected to get my name in the newspapers without doing something wicked."

- "The full meaning of life, the collective meaning of all human desires, is fundamentally a mystery beyond our grasp. As a young man, I chafed at this state of affairs. But by now I have made peace with it. I even feel a certain honor to be associated with such a mystery."(2)

- "It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness."(3)

Eugene Wigner

Contents

Personal Life

Early Life

Family Life

Scientific Significance

Manhattan Project

The Wigner Effect

Awards

Famous Quotes

See also

Further reading

External links

References

Navigation menu