Customer Reviews

The Recollections Of Eugene P. Wigner: As Told To Andrew Szanton

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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.

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.

This engrossing book offers the reader a behind-the-scenes view of the Manhattan Project and the development of the Atomic Bomb. It also describes Wigner's later work refining nuclear technology and theorizing on quantum mechanics. Other notable physicists and geniuses of the era--including Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, Paul Dirac, John von Neumann, and Edward Teller (the model for Dr. Strangelove) feature in fascinating anecdotes throughout the book. Von Neumann, Teller, Szilard and Wigner were all from the same Hungarian-Jewish circle in turn-of-the-century Budapest, and Wigner's reverence for the other three was tinged with rivalry - he was the only one of the four to win a Nobel Prize, though a plausible case could be made that the other three were equally deserving. The human-interest side is well described: we hear about how Wigner developed his interest in science and mathematics while confined to a tuberculosis sanitarium as a boy and how he and other Jewish physicists got out of Nazi-controlled Europe to eventually work against Hitler. Because the autobiography is "as told to" memoirist Andrew Szanton, it explains scientific concepts so clearly in lay terms that my nuclear physicist father and I both enjoyed this book equally. I recommend it to anyone interested in science, creativity, WWII history or just looking for an interesting read.