Eugene Wigner - Later Years

Later Years

In 1960, Wigner published a now classic article on the philosophy of mathematics and of physics, which has become his best-known work outside of technical mathematics and physics, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences". He argued that biology and cognition could be the origin of physical concepts, as we humans perceive them, and that the happy coincidence that mathematics and physics were so well matched, seemed to be "unreasonable" and hard to explain. His reasoning was resisted by the Harvard mathematician Andrew M. Gleason.

In 1963, Wigner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. Wigner professed to never have considered the possibility that this might occur, and he added: "I never expected to get my name in the newspapers without doing something wicked." Wigner also won the Enrico Fermi award, and the National Medal of Science. In 1992, at the age of 90, Wigner published a memoir, The Recollections of Eugene P. Wigner with Andrew Szanton. Wigner died three years later in Princeton, New Jersey. One of his significant students was Abner Shimony. Wigner's third wife was Eileen Clare-Patton Hamilton Wigner ("Pat"), the widow of another physicist, Donald Ross Hamilton, who had died in 1972. (He had been the Dean of the Graduate School at Princeton University.)

Near the end of his life, Wigner's thoughts turned more philosophical. In his memoirs, Wigner said: "The full meaning of life, the collective meaning of all human desires, is fundamentally a mystery beyond our grasp. As a young man, I chafed at this state of affairs. But by now I have made peace with it. I even feel a certain honor to be associated with such a mystery." He became interested in the Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism, particularly its ideas of the universe as an all pervading consciousness. In his collection of essays Symmetries and Reflections – Scientific Essays, he commented "It was not possible to formulate the laws (of quantum theory) in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness."

Wigner also conceived the Wigner's friend thought experiment in physics, which is an extension of the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment. The Wigner's friend experiment asks the question: "At what stage does a 'measurement' take place?" Wigner designed the experiment to highlight how he believed that consciousness is necessary to the quantum-mechanical measurement processes.