OPINIONS
Story last updated at 1:49 p.m. on Tuesday, June 5, 2001
Weinberg, left, and Wigner. (Guess the year by the topcoat style.) file photo Eugene P. Wigner: Reminiscences of one he mentored
Alvin Weinberg told "Eugene Wigner stories" a week ago tonight to about 250 listeners at Pollard Auditorium. Like:
* How Wigner, in 1936, predicted that man would release nuclear energy within five years.
* That Wigner, who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1963, never took a formal physics course.
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Dick Smyser
* About the intensely paradoxical relationship between Wigner and DuPont, one of the major U.S. industries involved with the early atomic bomb effort and first operating contractor for Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
* How Wigner, more than anyone else within the Manhattan Project, was obsessed with fear that Nazi Germany would develop the bomb first.
* How Wigner once suggested to Weinberg that they visit Albert Einstein but Einstein wasn't home. Weinberg, former director of ORNL who regularly proudly calls Wigner his mentor, was first associated with the acclaimed physicist at University of Chicago where the first controlled nuclear chain reaction was achieved Dec. 2, 1942, just one year later than Wigner had said it would be. Wigner, who when he made the prediction was at University of Wisconsin, later declared, "I had no basis for that statement." As a young man in Budapest, Wigner had told his father that he wanted to be a physics professor. "And how many physics professors do you know?" his father asked. About four, young Wigner answered. His father was not impressed that such a career path offered much hope for employment. | |
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