Speaker
Prof.
István Hargittai
Description
Eugene P. Wigner had a decisive impact on my scientific career. We first exchanged letters in 1964; my first ever publication in 1964 was a response to one of his papers. In 1969, we met, and he gave me extensive tutorials about the utilization of the symmetry concept in physics and chemistry. Wigner was one of the five so-called „Martians,” a loosely defined group of world-renowned Jewish-Hungarian-American scientists who were willing to risk their scientific careers in order to address themselves to the defense of the United States and the Free World during World War II and the ensuing Cold War. Wigner was a chemical engineer by training, but became a theoretical physicist, first in Berlin, then at Princeton University. He applied the symmetry concept, and in particular group theory, in the description of chemical reactions and in nuclear physics. In 1963, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Eugene P. Wigner and István Hargittai in 1969, in front of the old physics building
at the University of Texas at Austin
Wigner was active in mobilizing science and his fellow scientists for defense-related research even before World War II started and he played a role in initiating the Manhattan Project. He participated in building the atomic pile of the Metallurgical Laboratory at Chicago University. He became the world’s first nuclear engineer and played a pivotal role in developing the Hanford reactors for the production of plutonium. After World War II, for a couple of years, he was the scientific director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, after which he returned to theoretical physics at Princeton University. Politically he was conservative and a dedicated advocate of civil defense.
The above is a very sketchy outline of Wigner’s well-known path. My presentation will focus on less known aspects of Wigner’s life and oeuvre.
Bibliography:
Istvan Hargittai, The Martians of Science: Five Physicists Who Changed the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006 hardcover; 2008 softcover).
