Paul Wigner
was born into a Jewish family in Hungary
in 1902. After a university educated in Budapest he did postgraduate
studies in Berlin where he attended lectures by Albert
Einstein. Over the next few years he carried out research
into nuclear physics and in 1927 concluded that parity is conserved
in a nuclear reaction..
Wigner
emigrated to the United States in 1930 where
he became professor of theoretical physics. In August, 1939, Wigner
joined with two other Jewish scientists,
who had fled from Nazi Germany, Albert
Einstein and Leo
Szilard,
to write a letter to President Franklin
D. Roosevelt, about the developments that had been taking place
in nuclear physics. They warned Roosevelt that scientists in Germany
were working on the possibility of using uranium to produce nuclear
weapons.
Roosevelt
responded by setting up a scientific advisory committee to investigate
the matter. He also had talks with the British government about ways
of sabotaging the German efforts to produce nuclear weapons.
In 1942
the Manhattan Engineer Project was set up in the United States under
the command of Brigadier General Leslie Groves.
As well as Wigner other Allied scientists recruited to produce an
atom bomb included Robert
Oppenheimer,
David Bohm, Rudolf
Peierls,
Felix
Bloch,
Leo
Szilard,
Eugene Wigner, Niels
Bohr, James Chadwick,
James Franck, Emilio
Segre,
Enrico Fermi, Klaus
Fuchs and Edward
Teller.
After the
dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki
Wigner returned to Princeton University. Wigner famously wrote that:
"Physics is becoming so unbelievably complex that it is taking
longer and longer to train a physicist. It is taking so long, in fact,
to train a physicist to the place where he understands the nature
of physical problems that he is already too old to solve them."
Wigner,
who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Maria Goeppert Mayer and
Hans Jensen in 1963, remained at Princeton until 1971. Paul Wigner
died in 1995.
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