Book Description
"A wealth of observations on contemporary mathematicians and physicists, from David Hilbert to Richard Feynman." --American Scientist

One of the greatest physicists of the 20th century recounts his journey from Hungary and the Nazi invasion to the creation of the first atomic bomb. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

History and Science brought seamlessly together -----
By structuring Eugene Wigner's story in such a readable and flowing format, Andrew Szanton has provided us with a book that takes us back to the early 20th century and parallels many of the European political experiments with the scientific progress of that century.This book provides historical insight as well as traces the qualities of the prominent scientific minds of the time.One is inspired as Eugene Wigner's modest recollections show us a great scientific mind, who was delighted to give his research to the world.It is a great lesson in ethics for all of us, as well as a truly engaging read.As Wigner and Szanton carry us along through the decades, you can feel the camaraderie amongst the great minds in physics and imagine the energy that must have been exchanged during their coffee talks after colloquia presentations.This book is also a wonderful complement to the published works of Richard Feynman.

A towering figure
When Eugene Wigner died a few years ago, we lost another towering figure in twentieth century physics. His contributions are probably equally well remembered by physicists and chemists, especially in the field of spectroscopy, where he published a seminal text on using the theory of discrete groups to analyse data.

But this book of his recollections is not about his scientific papers, per se. Rather, the most interesting sections to many readers will be the times that he lived through, and the other major figures that he knew, like Dirac and Einstein. The book goes through the turbulent and terrible years of the 1930s and 40s. Thus, you can see the development of quantum mechanics and his involvement in it during the 30s. At a time when the key ideas in this subject were rapidly discovered. Then see the development of nuclear fission and the Manhattan Project through his eyes, at the University of Chicago campus during World War 2.

An excellent book for a general audience. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Why we can discover laws of nature
Although simply written, this is not a book for beginers. On the other hand it doesn't hurt to read it early and think about it for a long time, rereading it from time to time, in order finally to get the main point. Wigner points out that the basis for answering the question posed by him, 'Why is it possible to discover laws of nature?' is explained in every elementary physics text but the point is too subtle, is therefore lost on nearly every reader. The answer, he explains convincingly, lies in invariance principles. As an example, were local Galilean invariance not true it would have been impossible for Galileo to have discovered any law of motion at all. The same holds for local translational, rotational and time-translational invariance. Inherent in Wigner's argument is the explanation why the so-called principle of general covariance is not the foundation of general relativity, which also is grounded in the local invariance principles of special relativity.

Contrast this with the nonsense propagated in the first chapter of Samuelson's well-sold Economics text, where he asserts on the basis of a hokey picture that the difference between physics and the social sciences is not as great as it seems. In fact, there are no known invariance principles in the socio-economic sciences, and no corresponding laws of socio-economic motion (motion of money, e.g.). At best, there are intelligent gambling strategies like the equations for predicting option pricing, but these depend on market statistics that can change from one era to the next. Nor is it guaranteed that options traders will forever favor the dalta-hadging strategy and it's refinements. The last word: mathematical modelling and computer simulations are a completely different cat than approximate predictions based on laws of nature, like the laws of physics and genetics. The fact that we cannot yet (if ever) solve the Navier-Stokes equations for turbulence, which are grounded in local invariance principles and physical law, has nothing to do with our general inability to model human behavior mathematically. ... Read more