Eugene Wigner Quotes

21 Sourced Quotes

Physics is becoming so unbelievably complex that it is taking longer and longer to train a physicist. It is taking so long, in fact, to train a physicist to the place where he understands the nature of physical problems that he is already too old to solve them.

Eugene Wigner
The great mathematician fully, almost ruthlessly, exploits the domain of permissible reasoning and skirts the impermissible. That his recklessness does not lead him into a morass of contradictions is a miracle in itself: certainly it is hard to believe that our reasoning power was brought, by Darwin's process of natural selection, to the perfection which it seems to possess.

Eugene Wigner
The world is very complicated and it is clearly impossible for the human mind to understand it completely. Man has therefore devised an artifice which permits the complicated nature of the world to be blamed on something which is called accidental and thus permits him to abstract a domain in which simple laws can be found.

Eugene Wigner
Physics can teach us only what the laws of nature are today. It is only Astronomy that can teach us what the initial conditions for these laws are.

Eugene Wigner
With thermodynamics, one can calculate almost everything crudely; with kinetic theory, one can calculate fewer things, but more accurately; and with statistical mechanics, one can calculate almost nothing exactly.

Eugene Wigner
Solipsism may be logically consistent with present Quantum Mechanics, Monism in the sense of Materialism is not.

Eugene Wigner
In science, it is not speed that is the most important. It is the dedication, the commitment, the interest and the will to know something and to understand it — these are the things that come first.

Eugene Wigner
Mathematics is the science of skillful operations with concepts and rules invented just for this purpose.

Eugene Wigner
Part of the art and skill of the engineer and of the experimental physicist is to create conditions in which certain events are sure to occur.

Eugene Wigner
It is now natural for us to try to derive the laws of nature and to test their validity by means of the laws of invariance, rather than to derive the laws of invariance from what we believe to be the laws of nature.

Eugene Wigner
A possible explanation of the physicist's use of mathematics to formulate his laws of nature is that he is a somewhat irresponsible person. As a result, when he finds a connection between two quantities which resembles a connection well-known from mathematics, he will jump at the conclusion that the connection is that discussed in mathematics simply because he does not know of any other similar connection.

Eugene Wigner
The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation of it.

Eugene Wigner
When the province of physical theory was extended to encompass microscopic phenomena through the creation of quantum mechanics, the concept of consciousness came to the fore again. It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness.

Eugene Wigner
There is no natural phenomenon that is comparable with the sudden and apparently accidentally timed development of science, except perhaps the condensation of a super-saturated gas or the explosion of some unpredictable explosives.

Eugene Wigner
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.

Eugene Wigner
The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.

Eugene Wigner
Physics does not endeavour to explain nature. In fact, the great success of physics is due to a restriction of its objectives: it only endeavours to explain the regularities in the behavior of objects.

Eugene Wigner
This [gauge] invariance is, of course, an artificial one, similar to that which we could obtain by introducing into our equations the location of a ghost. The equations must then be invariant with respect to changes in the coordinate of that ghost. One does not see, in fact, what good the introduction of the coordinate of the ghost does.

Eugene Wigner
We have ceased to expect from physics an explanation of all events, even of the gross structure of the universe, and we aim only at the discovery of the laws of nature, that is the regularities, of the events.

Eugene Wigner
I believe that the present laws of physics are at least incomplete without a translation into terms of mental phenomena.

Eugene Wigner
Where in the Schrödinger equation do you put the joy of being alive?

Eugene Wigner