I recently completed reading The Recollections Of Eugene P. Wigner and I highly recommend it to anyone who loves reading memoirs and biographies of scientists and mathematicians.

Below are three themes which are not the most important in the book, but the ones that most resonated with me. 

The Philosophy of Reason

“As rulers, the communists were hardly cruel, but they were quite unreasonable.”

Sprinkled across many pages, Wigner drops hints of one of his fundamental philosophies. The “philosophy” of reason. Wigner’s philosophy classifies actions, decisions, and people as reasonable or unreasonable. Here’s a fun sequence of classifications: Wigner considered Hitler’s political methods unreasonable long before he killed any jew. He considered the United States a reasonable place and Europe not as much. As a professor at Princeton University, their decision to fire him was not reasonable but the school was not so unreasonable as to not rehire him. The decision to rehire him was reasonable so it would have been unreasonable for Wigner to hold a grudge against Princeton for his initial termination.

It’s not at all shocking that a scientist would measure most actions against the ruler of reason but it’s very much worth highlighting. Not so much the specific axis of reason but the practice of having a core philosophy to judge most actions against. In our ever changing, increasingly complex, big data producing world, it can be sometimes difficult to translate a deluge of inputs into coherent decisions or to make sense of the decisions that others make and the actions that they take. From my own experience, asking questions like “Is this reasonable?”, “Is this ethical?”, “Is this fair?” etc. can bring a surprising amount of clarity to difficult situations.

The Gift of Forgetting Unpleasant Memories

For the process of forgetting can also be a great and subtle pleasure. Few young people understand this. The pleasure of forgetting comes in ridding oneself of a piece of rudeness from years past…

One could tell that Eugene Wigner died a happy man from his memoirs. Despite the list of terrible things that happened to him over the course of his life, Wigner scarcely harbored a grudge against anyone. One would think that his gracious and forgiving nature could be explained by an inner piety or an appeal to a higher moral ground. This was not the case at all. Wigner had an extraordinary ability to not pay attention to hurtful experiences to the extent of completely forgetting them.

In his memoirs, he paints a picture of the awful period of living in Austria during the communist occupation of his hometown in Hungary. He also mentions the bullying and discrimination that he experienced as a young jewish boy in Hungary. These experiences he mentioned, almost casually, as experiences he did not remember too well nor gave too much significance to. Almost like he had forgotten most of them.

I am not exactly sure where I chanced upon this thought but I have always hypothesized that forgetfulness was an aspect of long term happiness. Wigner’s memoirs and my personal life seem to support this hypothesis. 

Science as a Social Activity

Colloquia discussions were lively, with something of a dilettante spirit. We wondered how to reconcile light interference and the photoelectric effect. We discussed the ionization energy of mercury, the second excited state of thallium, the Bohr-Stoner periodic table, and the theory of the hydrogen molecule…

…Even when the colloquium was over, we did not scatter. Many of us went out to a coffeehouse and sat around a large table, talking further. Conversation was not always rigorous, but it touched on all of the things we loved, not only physics but nature, family, and culture.

Wigner knew and worked with a lot of the scientific heavyweights of his time. He went to the same elementary school as Johnny von Neumann in Hungary and moved to the US with him. He was very close to Leo Szilard, Albert Einstein, and Michael Polanyi. He knew Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger, and Paul Dirac fairly well. In fact, Paul Dirac was his brother-in-law.

Flipping through the pages of his Wigner’s memoirs, you get the sense of the very social nature of science, and physics in particular. During his time in Berlin, science was constantly being discussed at public academic forums, private dinners, hallways, and coffee shops. Every member exploring, questioning, discussing, and engaging in the social practice of science. Long after he had moved on to Princeton University, one could tell that national borders or even in-house academic departmental borders could not quench the very social nature of science.