Budapest University of Technology and Economics
and Hungarian Academy of Sciences, H-1521 Budapest
www.roadtostockholm.com
My field of research has been the determination and modeling of molecular structure. Symmetry considerations have been fundamental in these studies. However, my interest in symmetry early on outgrew my field of research, due to three circumstances. One was the realization that symmetry helped me cut down the amount of data I needed to remember in my studies a great deal. Another was my interest in photography, especially after our children had been born. Along with taking their pictures, I took pictures of everything else that I found of interest and soon I realized that these were mostly things related to symmetry. Finally, my meeting with Eugene Wigner in 1969 was an inspiration for me in my symmetry interest.
This meeting took place in Austin, Texas, where, months before I met Wigner I had met someone who was a spitting image of Wigner in his physical appearance. He was a retired shoe salesman, an exceedingly polite man, originally also an immigrant from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. Even his politeness, however, paled by Wigner’s legendary politeness. Wigner’s politeness and modesty on occasions reached such a degree that it irritated people and many saw through it as being a shield preventing others from getting close to him. Freeman Dyson and his wife lived very close to the Wigners in Princeton for many years. According to Dyson,[2] they were friendly, but they never got close. About Wigner’s politeness, this was Dyson’s observation,
There is a professor here, whose wife is Japanese. She is a sociologist and writes about Japanese society. One of the papers she has written, and I think it is brilliant, is called “Politeness as a Tool of Repression”. It is certainly true for the Japanese society and perhaps a little bit with Wigner, too.
In physics though, his modesty may have helped Wigner to recognize the principal tasks of physics. In his Nobel lecture[3] he stressed the limitations in the ambitions of physics and physicists:
…[P]hysics does not endeavor to explain nature. In fact, the great success of physics is due to a restriction of its objectives: it only endeavors to explain the regularities in the behavior of objects. This renunciation of the broader aim, and the specification of the domain for which an explanation can be sought, now appears to us an obvious necessity. In fact, the specification of the explainable may have been the greatest discovery of physics so far. It does not seem easy to find its inventor, or to give the exact date of its origin. Kepler still tried to find the exact rules for the magnitude of the planetary orbits, similar to his laws of planetary motion. Newton already realized that physics would deal, for a long time, only with the explanation of those of the regularities discovered by Kepler which we now call Kepler’s laws.
The regularities in the phenomena which physical science endeavors to uncover are called the laws of nature. The name is actually very appropriate. Just as legal laws regulate actions and behavior under certain conditions but do not try to regulate all actions and behavior, the laws of physics also determine the behavior of its object of interest only under certain well-defined conditions but leave much freedom otherwise…
Wigner’s Nobel Prize was “for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles.”
According to another physics Nobel laureate (1979) Steven Weinberg,[4]
Wigner realized, earlier than most physicists, the importance of thinking about symmetries as objects of interest in themselves. In the 1930s, although physicists talked a lot about symmetries, they talked about them in the context of specific theories of nuclear force. Wigner was able to transcend that and he discussed symmetry in a way, which didn’t rely on any particular theory of nuclear force. I liked that very much.
Wigner received the inspiration to look for regularities in nature from his mentor in his doctoral studies in Berlin, Michael Polanyi. We know this from Wigner’s two-minute speech at the Stockholm City Hall, following the award ceremony of the Nobel Prize in December 1963.[5] Wigner devoted this two-minute speech to his teachers. He said[6] that
I do wish to mention the inspiration received from Polanyi. He taught me, among other things, that science begins when a body of phenomena is available which shows some coherence and regularities, that science consists in assimilating these regularities and in creating concepts which permit expressing these regularities in a natural way. He also taught me that it is this method of science rather than the concepts themselves (such as energy) which should be applied to other fields of learning.
Looking for regularities is very much the same as looking for symmetries. In this sense, Wigner’s interest in symmetry may have originated from his interactions with Polanyi. There was then a less direct impact by Polanyi in turning Wigner’s attention to symmetries. After his doctorate Wigner returned to Hungary and worked in the same leather tannery where his father had a managerial job. Even decades later I sensed pride in Wigner’s describing his knowledge of the chemistry processes involved in tannery and the different ways of preparing the leather. Some leather is prepared for the bottom of the shoe, some for the upper part of the shoe, yet some other leather is prepared for travel bags. Wigner had a tremendous knowledge of chemistry, especially materials. This came from his training as a chemical engineer and he made good use of this knowledge later in the Manhattan Project. During the two years he spent at the tannery, he kept subscribing to the German physical journal Zeitschrift für Physik and read it, in his words,[7] “in the evenings industriously.” Then,6
After two years, to my great surprise, I received a letter of invitation from Professor Becker, the newly appointed professor of theoretical physics at the Institute of Technology in Berlin, offering me a position of assistant. I suspect that it was my teacher, the person I worked with for my doctoral dissertation, Michael Polanyi, who must have recommended me. He was a famous scientist and excellent man.
……..
Before my job started with Professor Becker, I had two months in Berlin and I used that time to learn crystallography, and this was very useful later. In crystallography I learned about group theory, which became the center of my interest for several years. It was a great joy when Schrödinger’s paper came out in which he described his equation and quantum mechanics, and which made the application of group theory to quantum mechanics so much easier.
Wigner was not only an excellent pupil; he became an outstanding mentor himself. He served as guide for several major figures in condensed matter physics in the United States. John Bardeen, was one of them. Bardeen is the only person to have ever received two Nobel Prizes in physics (1956 and 1972). From Bardeen’s description, Wigner emerges as a popular mentor and Bardeen notes that “Wigner was attracting a number of other students and postdoctoral fellows interested in problems of solid state physics.”[8] Among them were F. Seitz and C. Herring. Herring was later Philip Anderson’s (Nobel Prize in 1977) mentor. However, Wigner may have not been equally good a pedagogue for everybody. Steven Weinberg was a graduate student at Princeton when Wigner was a professor there. This is how he remembers Wigner as his teacher3:
I took his course in nuclear physics. He was not a very good teacher because he was obsessively worried that there might be someone in the class who wasn’t understanding him. So he went very slowly. But he still was very profound. He did me great compliment once, when he had to go out of town, of asking me to take over the class. I didn’t learn much from Wigner when I was a graduate student at Princeton. But in the years following, I found that my point of view toward physics was very much in tune with Wigner’s, much more so than with other people. Wigner had analyzed, especially in 1939, the nature of the elementary particles and, in particular, the significance of the spin, in a way far superior and much more well-grounded in fundamental principles than what I had earlier learned, say, from the treatment of the spin by Paul Dirac. In that sense I became a disciple of Wigner. In my book on quantum field theory I very much follow Wigner’s 1939 paper.
At the time when Wigner received the Nobel Prize, I did not pay much attention to the Nobel Prizes. However, next year, in the fall of 1964, I read an article by Wigner in the Hungarian literary weekly Élet és Irodalom (Life and Literature).[9] In the wake of Wigner’s Nobel Prize, they translated an earlier Wigner article into Hungarian and communicated excerpts from it.[10] At that time I was a Master’s degree student at Moscow State University. The topic of his article was the limits of science and it immensely interested me, so I wrote a response and sent it to the editor of Élet és Irodalom. To my surprise, it soon appeared and was quite a sizeable article.[11] I had never written anything before let alone seen my writing and name printed. It was quite a thing for a student. Soon after the appearance of the article, something of even greater significance happened. I received a long letter from Wigner and some reprints of his papers. He agreed with some of what I had written and disagreed with other aspects, all in his most polite way.
Following our
first exchange in 1964, Wigner and I kept up a correspondence on and off until
his last years, but met in person only once, in Texas. That one meeting, however, consisted of five
one-hour-long conversations during a week when I was spending a whole year in
Austin, and Wigner came for a one-week visit at the invitation of the Physics Department. Although I am a chemist, my research has been
somewhere between physics and chemistry.
My principal technique for molecular structure determination, during the
first decades of my career, was gas-phase electron diffraction. In Europe, the kind of research I have done
is mainly done in chemistry departments, whereas in the United States such work
is done as much in physics departments as in chemistry departments. The then chairman of the physics department of
the University of Texas, Harold P. Hanson was interested in this area. Hanson was interested in X-ray scattering and
electron scattering. He was a co-author
of a “citation classic” paper of calculated atomic X-ray scattering factors
that at one time many workers used in X-ray crystallography. Hanson had invited one of the great men in
the field of electron diffraction, the Norwegian Otto Bastiansen, for a
Visiting Professorship. It was at the
time of great expansion of the University of Texas at Austin. Other famous scientists came for shorter or
longer visits at that time. I have
described my meeting with Michael Polanyi in Austin, Texas, in 1969, elsewhere.[12]
Bastiansen
received a lavish invitation, and was offered a large stipend for the academic
year 1969–1970; they also suggested to him to bring two of his co-workers with
him. My first visit to Oslo in 1968
coincided with Bastiansen’s preparations for his trip. He had selected his two associates from among
his Norwegian co-workers, but one of them backed off due to a mixture of
anti-American feelings and his wife’s reluctance to leave Norway. It was 1968, the year of the Robert Kennedy
and Martin Luther King assassinations. Thus, Bastiansen offered me the slot,
which I was only too happy to take. When
I returned to Hungary from Norway in June 1968, I immediately set out to secure
the necessary permission to go to Texas.
Bastiansen left at the end of August for the United States and I
followed him at the end of January next year.
It took more than half a year for me to get permission and I was lucky
to get it in the first place. The
government frowned upon foreign interactions initiated by individuals rather
than arranged by state organizations. By
the time Wigner visited, Bastiansen had left, but I was continuing my term at
the Physics Department to complete my one-year stay. I was quite alone because, in the meantime,
Harold Hanson had also left.
When I heard
about Wigner’s forthcoming visit —his lectures were advertised well ahead of time—
I went to see his official hosts. I told
them that I had known Wigner if only by correspondence and would like to see
him while he was there. They declined,
explaining it was very expensive for them to bring Wigner to Texas and they
could not waste his time on me. However,
they let me leave a note for Wigner in which I said hello and gave him my
location in the department. Wigner must
have received my note because he came to see me in my office every morning
during his stay in Austin and spent an hour with me from 8 am to 9 am, when his
official program started. Thus he spent
some of his “private” time with me with no loss to his hosts.
We talked about
many things. He talked to me about
symmetry, and this is what had the longest-ranging impact on me. Wigner had contributed to the application of
the symmetry principles in the most fundamental ways and the Nobel Committee
stressed this in its one-sentence description of his achievements (vide supra). It was fortunate that at the time of our meeting,
I was engaged in studying one of the most symmetrical molecules, called
adamantane C10H16.
The name refers to its high stability.
The structure of the molecule resembles the diamond structure. Wigner’s interest was in the solid state
rather than in molecules, but he found my molecules intriguing. Later Wigner sent me his essay book, Symmetries and Reflections,[13]
in which he had a diagram of the diamond structure. It dawned on me only later how lucky I was
that, if only for a few days, I had Wigner as my mentor in symmetry.
On that
occasion we hardly went into specifics, but my personal encounters with him
helped us when my wife and I reviewed the whole field of chemistry from the
point of view of symmetry utilization.[14] Here I mention only a few examples
without discussing them; their discussion and chemical application is readily
available.13 A
fundamental property of the electronic wave function of a molecule is that it
can be used as basis for irreducible representations of the point group of a
molecule. This property establishes the
connection between the symmetry of a molecule and its wave function. The preceding statement follows from Wigner’s
theorem which says that all eigenfunctions of a molecular system belong to one
of the symmetry species of the group.[15]
The first
application of symmetry considerations to chemical reactions can be attributed
to Wigner and Witmer.[16] The Wigner-Witmer rules are concerned with
the conservation of spin and orbital angular momentum in the reaction of
diatomic molecules. Although symmetry is
not explicitely mentioned, it is present implicitely in the principle of
conservation of orbital angular momentum. Wigner and Witmer prepared the ground
for the breakthrough that followed almost four decades later through the works
of Woodward and Hoffmann, Fukui, Pearson, and others. For two of them (Fukui and Hoffmann) it even
resulted in a Nobel Prize.[17] The main idea of their work is that symmetry
phenomena may play as important a role in chemical reactions as they do in the
construction of molecular orbitals or in molecular spectroscopy. It was even possible to make certain symmetry
based “selection rules” for the “allowedness” and “forbiddenness” of a chemical
reaction similarly to spectroscopic transitions.[18]
There are important considerations in the symmetry description of chemical
reactions that are summarized under the general expression of Conservation of
Orbital Symmetry. The technique that revolutionized the discussion and even
prediction of chemical reactions was a relatively simple construction of
correlation diagrams. In such a
construction, among all possible symmetry elements, those must be considered
that are maintained throughout the approach of one molecule by another and that
bisect bonds that are either being formed or being broken during the chemical
reaction. There must be at least one
such symmetry element. The next step is
to connect levels of like symmetry without violating the so-called non-crossing
rule. This non-crossing rule was
introduced by Neumann and Wigner, and independently by Teller.[19]
According to this rule, two orbitals of the same symmetry cannot intersect in
the correlation diagram. These diagrams provide valuable information about the
transition state of the chemical reaction.[20]
Looking back to my conversations with Wigner about symmetry, two things crystallize. Both are fundamental, almost trivial, but they provided a great introduction for me into symmetry considerations. One is that there is the geometrical kind of symmetry and then there is everything else, which includes, among others, the symmetry of molecules. The molecules are not rigid bodies and of the larger-amplitude is their motion, the more they are away from structures with rigorous symmetry. The adamantane molecule has a rather rigid carbon cage and its Td symmetry is unambiguous, but there are floppy molecules too that can be described much more loosely with point groups. Wigner then helped me see the yet much broader meaning of symmetry that Hermann Weyl had made broadly familiar through his Princeton lectures and his classic book[21] that symmetry is also harmony and proportion.
The other characteristics that Wigner’s approach to symmetry has remained in my mind as sticking out of many other scientists’ interpretations, that Wigner did not distinguish between chemical symmetry and physical symmetry, and so on. For him the symmetry concept transcended man’s subdivision of nature into subject areas. In various fields and various applications, the models that we utilize may have different emphases on different aspects and may ignore different other aspects, but the symmetry concept itself is universal. Perhaps this universality is what has captivated me most about the symmetry concept and has prompted me to help to forge alliances among the most diverse disciplines[22] and prompted my wife and me to try to bring its benefits to the general public[23] and to children in particular.[24] And perhaps this universality that Wigner instilled in me left the longest lasting impact in me from my memorable meeting with him and prompted me to write about the “unreasonable effectiveness of the symmetry concept.”[25]
Disregarding the boundaries of various branches
of science served Wigner well. It has
been noted repeatedly how useful his knowledge of materials proved to be in the
Manhattan project. His studies with
Polanyi about the mechanism of chemical reactions and the transition state have
also proved useful in other branches of science. John Wheeler provided a nice example to
illustrate this point[26]:
We
had to understand this new nuclear phenomenon, fission. It was obvious that the nucleus of such a
heavy element as uranium must undergo a considerable deformation before it
splits. For that it needs energy. When the uranium is bombarded by neutrons,
the neutron can provide this energy; we say that the nucleus is excited. This excitation then could initiate a vibration
in the nucleus that could deform it. Our
Hungarian friend, Eugene Wigner helped us out.
He ate some oysters downtown Princeton and got sick and was in the
hospital on the campus. I went to see
him at the hospital to get some help.
The questions that Bohr and I were dealing with were like a chemical
reaction. Uranium breaking up is like
carbon monoxide breaking up into carbon and oxygen. I remembered that he had worked in that field
with Michael Polanyi. And he helped us
and, eventually, getting also ideas from discussions with other colleagues,
such as Placzek and Rosenfeld, Bohr and I saw how fission works. Bohr left Princeton in April of that year and
during the following months I wrote the paper and we submitted it to Physical Reviews in June. It came out in the
September 1, 1939 issue;[27] by
strange coincidence the same day when Germany invaded Poland.
I thoroughly enjoyed my encounter with Wigner and his lectures in Austin were attended to capacity. He gave talks on different topics, his physics and his almost-obsession topic of civil defense. In the latter he mentioned the Budapest subway system as an example of civil defense in Eastern Europe, and he urged the United States to pay more attention to civil defense. Almost 30 years later, Wigner’s infatuation with civil defense came up in my conversation with Steven Weinberg.3 Weinberg mentioned that he and Wigner
were quite different about politics. He got very angry with me. He edited a book about civil defense. … He was a very committed believer in the Cold War, that America should prepare in every possible way for a nuclear confrontation with the Russians. … The Cold War fed on itself in the sense that both sides were building more and more destructive weapons because the other side was. Wigner saw nothing wrong with that. He just wanted us to build everything we possibly could. He wasn’t interested in arms control, and I was. I wrote a rather negative review of his book on civil defense, and Wigner got very angry with me. He attacked me at a cocktail party in Princeton. He was quite hostile to me for a number of years.
Anderson27 and Wigner never argued about politics but
Anderson knew that they were quite different politically. Apparently Wigner became rather isolated in
the department at Princeton, at least on one occasion. Anderson remembers when they discussed the
David Bohm affair at a party,27 “Wigner was the only member of the department
who was not in favor of keeping Bohm.
The department voted for Bohm, but the President of Princeton turned
down our recommendation and fired him.
But Wigner had not voted for him.”
Anderson told
me an amusing story from 1954, which was about a trivial personal friction of
no particular interest. What I found of
interest is how Anderson characterized Wigner: “Wigner was not a
Nobel-Prize-winner yet but he was Wigner.”
People in
Austin in 1969 were very much in awe of him although there is a general opinion
that by about the 1950s he had lost his creativity in physics. According to Philip Anderson,[28] he could no longer keep abreast with
the latest developments and his influence started waning in the early
1950s. Weinberg told me an awkward
story.3
I
gave a talk at a symposium in his honor, explaining how much I thought I’d
learned from Wigner’s approach to elementary particles and why his approach was
superior to others. Wigner came up to me
after my talk, and he didn’t really understand what I’d said. Maybe what I interpreted as wignerism was not
entirely wignerism. He may also have
been already ill, so I don’t know.
Wigner is a person I have complicated feelings for.
Anderson’s
other encounter with Wigner was related to science and, sadly, it confirmed
Weinberg’s impressions of the late Wigner27:
Then
there was one more encounter around 1958 or 59, during one of my talks about
the BCS (Bardeen-Cooper-Schriefer) theory of superconductivity for which I had
resolved the problem of gauge invariance.
Wigner had written a paper in which he promulgated his
super-selection-rules. One of these said
that there can be no phase coherence between two states, which have different
numbers of particles. A fundamental
principle of the BCS theory allows phase coherence between states with
different numbers of particles. It
explicitly violates Wigner’s super-selection-rule. There is though a way you can get around it,
but I never believed much in its necessity.
I don’t think though that I was particularly dismissive of the
superselection-rules in my talk. In
fact, I didn’t mention them at all. But
Wigner saw through me and he was very negative in his polite way. He made it clear that he didn’t believe the
BCS theory, and to his dying day he never accepted it. This was a deeper problem between us whereas
the first two I mentioned were merely amusing incidents. Up until that point Wigner had been very
central in theoretical physics but at about that time, in the 50s, he put his
feet down and refused to go any further.
At that point Wigner, as a person, seemed to become less relevant to
physics.
Wigner
went to the United States in 1930 for the first time. He had a half-time job in Princeton and a
half-time job in Berlin. When Hitler
came to power, he decided to leave Germany for good and he helped his parents
and sisters to go to the United States from Hungary too. In the mid-1930s, he lost his job at
Princeton and spent two years at the University of Wisconsin. This is how he remembered it in 19866:
In
Princeton I never felt at home but in Wisconsin I felt at home from the second
day. After two years, I was asked to
return to Princeton. The reason was that
the people whom they had wanted to have, and for whom they had fired me, did
not get the job in Princeton. Instead,
they invited Van Vleck to Princeton but he preferred Harvard and recommended me
in his stead. There was another reason
for me to leave Wisconsin. I became in
love with a young lady in Madison and we got married, but after eight months of
marriage she passed away. That made me
very sad and I thought it was better for me to go away from the place where I
had lost my better half. Thus I went
back to Princeton in 1937.
In
the video recording of 1986, Wigner talked to Clarence Larson about his
participation in the Manhattan Project and, what I find especially interesting,
about his later thoughts concerning the atomic bombs used in Japan in 19456:
Many
scientists came to the United States at that time from Germany, from
Europe. Hitler did something very good
for science in the United States. Niels
Bohr was visiting in Princeton and gave a colloquium. I could not attend because I had to be in a
hospital but a friend of mine, Dr. Szilard came to me and told me about
it. Bohr talked about Hahn and Strassmann’s
discovery of nuclear fission. We thought
a good deal about it and realized what enormous energies will be available this
way. We started to think also of the
danger of it. It became evident that
those who had said that atomic energy could not be liberated were mistaken.
We
soon began to realize also that it was quite possible that a bomb could be made
with uranium, based on liberating such energy.
We were very much afraid that the Germans would develop it because,
after all, they had discovered all that.
We were afraid that this would make it possible for Hitler to realize his
dream of ruling the whole Earth. For
most Americans, Hitler was so far away, in Germany, that they thought that they
did not have to worry about that.
Szilard and I did not think so.
We knew that if we could come from Hungary to the United States, then
Hitler would be able to come from Germany to the United States, and the
distance was even shorter from Germany.
I
persuaded two of my colleagues to work a little on this problem, and one of
them, slightly annoyed, told me, “You are pleasantly disagreeable.” We also wanted to interest the United States
as a whole because we thought that it was the duty of the government to defend
the country. We talked with several
people, but it was not very effective.
Nobody took it very seriously. It
was then Szilard’s idea to talk to Einstein about it. Perhaps Einstein could persuade the American
government that it was an important question.
So we went out to Long Island, where Einstein was vacationing. I expected that it would take a long time
before we would be able to convince him that this was a serious problem. He did not know about the process, he was not
interested in nuclear physics. But it
took only 15 minutes and he understood the danger and he dictated a letter in
German, which could be taken to the American authorities, even to the
President. I took down the letter,
brought it back to Princeton, had it translated into English, and had it typed,
and I think it was Teller and Szilard who took the letter back to Einstein and
he signed it. The letter then was taken
to President Roosevelt, who then appointed people to study the question. Eventually, General Groves was put in charge
of the program, and it was a great success.
As
it turned out, it was not necessary at that time because Hitler, who had been
told about the possibility of such a bomb, said that he would win the war long
before such a weapon could work. Hitler
did, in fact, lose the war before the bomb became effective. At that point we thought that it was not
necessary to continue the work on the bomb, but the government was not of that
opinion. General Groves also wanted to
continue and he said that we could use it against the Japanese and it would
shorten the war.
We
proposed then to demonstrate the bomb in the presence of some Japanese scientists
and military leaders. Groves once again
disagreed and said that we should demonstrate it on a city. And that is what happened, but we were
against it and were quite unhappy. We
thought that many Japanese lives could have been saved if the bomb had been
demonstrated on an uninhabited territory.
But, apparently, I must admit, and I will admit, we were probably
mistaken. Much later, I read in a book
that the demonstrations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have saved many, many
Japanese lives. Since I thought that a
demonstration over an uninhabited territory in the presence of Japanese
scientists and politicians could have sufficed, I went around and asked my
Japanese friends about it. And with one
exception, they said, “No, such a demonstration would have had no effect on the
Emperor.” According to all my Japanese
friends, with one exception, “It would not have had the same effect; it was
very good that you demonstrated it this way.”
Maybe that was the way to do it, but I did not think so at that
time. Of course, they knew the Japanese
politicians, the Japanese Emperor, and the Japanese military leaders much
better than we did. But I was very
surprised. They thought that many
Japanese lives were saved this way even though it led to the extinction of many
Japanese lives. Apparently General
Groves was right, and the bomb had to be demonstrated the way it was.
In
my conversations in 1969 with Wigner, apart from symmetry, we talked about many
other things too, for example, poetry.
His favorite was the Hungarian poet of the first half of the 19th
century, Mihály Vörösmarty, and I introduced him to the poetry of the martyr
Miklós Radnóti and later sent him a volume of Radnóti and corresponded with him
about it. Wigner was interested in
Hungarian politics, much more than I was.
I did not think there was any political life in Hungary, but he carefully
read even the speech of the defense minister, a truly insignificant figure, and
made comments on it. I also noticed
Wigner’s conservatism. At that time, in
1969, the first year of the Nixon Administration, the notion of Lyndon
Johnson’s Great Society[29]
was still very close and the question of poverty in America came up. Wigner denied that there were poor people in
America. As a proof he wanted me to come
and see his neighborhood in Princeton!
Both Anderson and Weinberg noted Wigner’s political conservatism.
Apart from what Wigner taught me about symmetry, what especially stayed in my memory was what he told me about the Hungary of the early 1920s, as he experienced it. Sadly I recognized much of what he said in my own experience in the 1960s. His most important observation was how the Hungarian authorities treated the very Hungarians they were supposed to serve. They were the authority and the rest were the subjects. People stood in their offices, no matter who they were, and whatever they needed they were asking for it like beggars are asking for a handout. Wigner said that whenever he felt any nostalgia about Hungary, he only needed to remember how the officials treated the people there, and it sufficed to sober him up.
[1] Originally prepared and delivered as a lecture to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences as part of the centennial session remembering Eugene P. Wigner (1902-1995) in November 2002.
[2] Hargittai, M., Conversation with Freeman Dyson in Princeton, New Jersey, 1999: M. Hargittai, I. Hargittai, Candid Science IV: Conversations with Famous Physicists. Imperial College Press, London, 2004.
[3] Wigner, E. P., “Events, Laws of Nature, and Invariance Principles.” In Nobel Lectures: Physics 1963-1970. Elsevier, Amsterdam, 1972, pp. 6-17.
[4] Hargittai, I., Conversation with Steven Weinberg in Austin, Texas, 1998: M. Hargittai, I. Hargittai, Candid Science IV: Conversations with Famous Physicists. Imperial College Press, London, 2004.
[5] There were three physicists laureates in 1963 and they decided among themselves that Wigner should be the one giving the speech. There is one speech only in each category of the Nobel Prize on the occasion of that reception. Wigner had, of course, some preeminence among the three laureates since he received half of the prize while the other two, Maria Goeppert-Mayer and Hans Jensen shared the other half “for their discoveries concerning nuclear shell structure.“ The composition of the three laureates caused some headache to the people responsible for the protocol of the Nobel ceremonies that year. If there is one physics laureate, his wife goes into the dining room on the arm of the king. Further rules regulate the assignment of the other laureates and their spouses to members of the royal family when going into the dining room, and as regards their seating order. In 1963, according to the alphabetical order, Goeppert-Mayer would have been the first among the physicists. However, the protocol people chose Wigner to be the first among the physicists, hence no new precedence had to be established. Wigner primacy was justified by the above consideration [Hargittai, I., The Road to Stockholm: Nobel Prizes, Science, and Scientists. Oxford University Press, 2002, paperback edition, 2003, p. 10].
[6] Wigner, E. P., “City Hall Speech ─ Stockholm, 1963.” In E. P. Wigner, Symmetries and Reflections: Scientific Essays, Indiana University, Bloomington and London, 1967, pp. 262-3.
[7] Hargittai, I., “’You are Pleasantly Disagreeable’: Eugene P. Wigner Remembers.” The Chemical Intelligencer 1999, 5(3), 50-52. This article is based on a video recording on March 4, 1986, by Clarence Larson. The interview will be published in a book: B. Hargittai, I. Hargittai, The Larson Tapes: Pioneers of Science and Technology (tentative title).
[8] Bardeen, J., “Reminiscences of early days in solid state physics.” Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A 1980, 371, 77-83.
[9] Wigner,
J., “Van-e a tudománynak határa?” Élet és
Irodalom 1964, VIII, 40. sz., 6-7.
old. (1964 október 3). [Here J. stands for Jenõ, Wigner’s original first name
whose English equivalent is Eugene.]
[10] Wigner, E. P., “The Limits of Science.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 1950, 94, No. 5 (October).
[11] Hargittai, I., “Tudományok határán.” Élet és Irodalom 1964, VIII, 51. sz., 6. old. (1964 december 19).
[12] Hargittai, I., Hargittai, M., In Our Own Image: Personal Symmetry in Discovery. Kluwer/Plenum, New York, 2000, p 14.
[13] E. P. Wigner, Symmetries and Reflections: Scientific Essays. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana, 1963.
[14] Hargittai, I., Hargittai, M., Symmetry through the Eyes of a Chemist (Second Edition). Plenum, New York, 1995.
[15] Wigner, E. P., Group Theory and Its Application to the Quantum Mechanics of Atomic Spectra. Academic press, New York, 1959.
[16] Wigner, E., Witmer, E. E. Z. Phys. 1928, 51, 859.
[17] Hargittai, I. The Road to Stockholm: Nobel Prizes, Science, and Scientists. Oxford University Press, 2002. Paperback edition, 2003.
[18] Important limitations though apply, see, Hargittai, I., Hargittai, M., Symmetry through the Eyes of a Chemist (Second Edition). Plenum, New York, 1995, p. 283, etc.
[19] Neumann, J. von, Wigner, E. Phys, Z. 1929, 30, 467; Teller, E. J. Phys. Chem. 1937, 41, 109.
[20] For examples, see, Hargittai, I., Hargittai, M., Symmetry through the Eyes of a Chemist (Second Edition). Plenum, New York, 1995, p. 293, etc.
[21] Weyl, H., Symmetry. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1952.
[22] Hargittai, I., ed., Symmetry: Unifying Human Understanding. Pergamon Press, 1986; Hargittai, I., ed., Symmetry 2: Unifying Human Understanding. Pergamon Press, 1989; Hargittai, I., Laurent, T. C., eds., Symmetry 2000. Portland Press, 2002.
[23] Hargittai, I., Hargittai, M., Symmetry: A Unifying Concept. Shelter Publications, Bolinas, California, 1994.
[24] Hargittai, M., Hargittai, I., Fedezzük föl a szimmetriát! (in Hungarian, Let’s Discover Symmetry!). Tankönyvkiadó, Budapest, 1989; Hargittai, M., Hargittai, I., Uptäck symmetri! (in Swedish, Let’s Discover Symmetry!) Natur och Kultur, Stockholm, 1998.
[25] Hargittai, I., “The unreasonable effectiveness of the symmetry concept (homage to Eugene P. Wigner).” In I. Hargittai, T. C. Laurent, eds., Symmetry 2000. Portland Press, London, 2002, pp. 609-620. Here reference is made to Wigner’s famous paper with a similar title, Wigner, E. P., “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.” In E. P. Wigner, Symmetries and Reflections: Scientific Essays. Indiana University, Bloomington and London, 1967, 222-237; reprinted from Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics 1960, 13, No. 1.
[26] Hargittai, M., Conversations with John A. Wheeler in Princeton, New Jersey, 1999 and 2000; M. Hargittai, I. Hargittai, Candid Science IV: Conversations with Famous Physicists. Imperial College Press, London, 2004.
[27] Bohr, N., Wheeler, J.A. Phys. Rev. 1939, 56, 426.
[28] Hargittai, I., Conversation with Philip Anderson in Princeton, New Jersey, 1999: M. Hargittai, I. Hargittai, Candid Science IV: Conversations with Famous Physicists. Imperial College Press, London, 2004.
[29] See, e.g., D. Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1976.