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156-504: Eugene Paul Wigner ( Hungarian : Wigner Jenő Pál , pronounced [ˈviɡnɛr ˈjɛnøː ˈpaːl] ; November 17, 1902 – January 1, 1995) was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist who also contributed to mathematical physics . He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 "for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles , particularly through

312-527: A Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics at the University of Bristol free of charge. He was permitted to skip the first year of the course owing to his engineering degree. Under the influence of Peter Fraser, whom Dirac called the best mathematics teacher, he had the most interest in projective geometry, and began applying it to the geometrical version of relativity Minkowski developed. In 1923, Dirac graduated, once again with first class honours, and received

468-601: A Turkic language continued to be a matter of impassioned political controversy throughout the 18th and into the 19th centuries. During the latter half of the 19th century, a competing hypothesis proposed a Turkic affinity of Hungarian, or, alternatively, that both the Uralic and the Turkic families formed part of a superfamily of Ural–Altaic languages . Following an academic debate known as Az ugor-török háború ("the Ugric-Turkic war"),

624-417: A circumfix , to change a word's meaning and its grammatical function. Hungarian uses vowel harmony to attach suffixes to words. That means that most suffixes have two or three different forms, and the choice between them depends on the vowels of the head word. There are some minor and unpredictable exceptions to the rule. Nouns have 18 cases , which are formed regularly with suffixes. The nominative case

780-458: A mathematical theory of great beauty and power, needing quite a high standard of mathematics for one to understand it. You may wonder: Why is nature constructed along these lines? One can only answer that our present knowledge seems to show that nature is so constructed. We simply have to accept it. One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing

936-530: A sanatorium in the Austrian mountains, before the doctors concluded that the diagnosis was mistaken. Wigner's family was Jewish, but not religiously observant, and his Bar Mitzvah was a secular one. From 1915 through 1919, he studied at the secondary grammar school called Fasori Evangélikus Gimnázium , the school his father had attended. Religious education was compulsory, and he attended classes in Judaism taught by

1092-535: A Korean physicist, Y. S. Kim , who met and was influenced by Dirac, also says: "It is quite fortunate for the physics community that Manci took good care of our respected Paul A. M. Dirac. Dirac published eleven papers during the period 1939–46. Dirac was able to maintain his normal research productivity only because Manci was in charge of everything else". Dirac was known among his colleagues for his precise and taciturn nature. His colleagues in Cambridge jokingly defined

1248-481: A certain honor to be associated with such a mystery." In his collection of essays 'Philosophical Reflections and Syntheses' (1995), he commented: "It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness." Wigner was credited as a member of the advisory board for the Western Goals Foundation , a private domestic intelligence agency created in

1404-622: A conference in Japan in August 1929. "Both still in their twenties, and unmarried, they made an odd couple. Heisenberg was a ladies' man who constantly flirted and danced, while Dirac—'an Edwardian geek', as biographer Graham Farmelo puts it—suffered agonies if forced into any kind of socializing or small talk. 'Why do you dance?' Dirac asked his companion. 'When there are nice girls, it is a pleasure,' Heisenberg replied. Dirac pondered this notion, then blurted out: 'But, Heisenberg, how do you know beforehand that

1560-431: A conference, one colleague raised his hand and said: "I don't understand the equation on the top-right-hand corner of the blackboard". After a long silence, the moderator asked Dirac if he wanted to answer the question, to which Dirac replied: "That was not a question, it was a comment." Dirac was also noted for his personal modesty. He called the equation for the time evolution of a quantum-mechanical operator, which he

1716-497: A conversation among young participants at the 1927 Solvay Conference about Einstein and Planck 's views on religion between Wolfgang Pauli , Heisenberg and Dirac. Dirac's contribution was a criticism of the political purpose of religion, which Bohr regarded as quite lucid when hearing it from Heisenberg later. Among other things, Heisenberg imagined that Dirac might say: I don't know why we are discussing religion. If we are honest—and scientists have to be—we must admit that religion

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1872-400: A design decision by DuPont to give the reactor additional load tubes for more uranium saved the project when neutron poisoning became a problem. Without the additional tubes, the reactor could have been run at 35% power until the boron impurities in the graphite were burned up and enough plutonium produced to run the reactor at full power; but this would have set the project back a year. During

2028-522: A divorcee. Dirac raised Margit's two children, Judith and Gabriel , as if they were his own. Paul and Margit Dirac also had two daughters together, Mary Elizabeth and Florence Monica. Margit, known as Manci, had visited her brother in 1934 in Princeton, New Jersey , from their native Hungary and, while at dinner at the Annex Restaurant, met the "lonely-looking man at the next table". This account from

2184-543: A drawing of the Wigner's Friend situation, which must be seen as the first evidence on paper of the thought experiment that was later assigned to be Wigner's. This suggests that Everett must at least have discussed the problem together with Wigner. In November 1963, Wigner called for the allocation of 10% of the national defense budget to be spent on nuclear blast shelters and survival resources, arguing that such an expenditure would be less costly than disarmament. Wigner considered

2340-400: A god, and such a god would probably be showing his influence in the quantum jumps which are taking place later on. On the other hand, if life can start very easily and does not need any divine influence, then I will say that there is no god. Dirac did not commit himself to any definite view, but he described the possibilities for scientifically answering the question of God. Dirac discovered

2496-681: A high proportion of words specific to agriculture and livestock are of Chuvash origin. A strong Chuvash influence was also apparent in Hungarian burial customs. The first written accounts of Hungarian date to the 10th century, such as mostly Hungarian personal names and place names in De Administrando Imperio , written in Greek by Eastern Roman Emperor Constantine VII . No significant texts written in Old Hungarian script have survived, because

2652-485: A leather tanner. He had an older sister, Berta, known as Biri, and a younger sister Margit, known as Manci, who later married British theoretical physicist Paul Dirac . He was home schooled by a professional teacher until the age of 9, when he started school at the third grade. During this period, Wigner developed an interest in mathematical problems. At the age of 11, Wigner contracted what his doctors believed to be tuberculosis . His parents sent him to live for six weeks in

2808-804: A meeting with Leó Szilárd and Albert Einstein that resulted in the Einstein–Szilárd letter , which prompted President Franklin D. Roosevelt to authorize the creation of the Advisory Committee on Uranium with the purpose of investigating the feasibility of atomic bombs . Wigner was afraid that the German nuclear weapon project would develop an atomic bomb first, and even refused to have his fingerprints taken because they could be used to track him down if Germany won. "Thoughts of being murdered," he later recalled, "focus your mind wonderfully." On June 4, 1941, Wigner married his second wife, Mary Annette Wheeler,

2964-399: A millennium. These include tehén 'cow' (cf. Avestan daénu ); tíz 'ten' (cf. Avestan dasa ); tej 'milk' (cf. Persian dáje 'wet nurse'); and nád 'reed' (from late Middle Iranian ; cf. Middle Persian nāy and Modern Persian ney ). Archaeological evidence from present-day southern Bashkortostan confirms the existence of Hungarian settlements between

3120-785: A million additional people scattered in other parts of the world. For example, there are more than one hundred thousand Hungarian speakers in the Hungarian American community and 1.5 million with Hungarian ancestry in the United States . Hungarian is the official language of Hungary, and thus an official language of the European Union. Hungarian is also one of the official languages of Serbian province of Vojvodina and an official language of three municipalities in Slovenia : Hodoš , Dobrovnik and Lendava , along with Slovene . Hungarian

3276-538: A new quantum theory was taken late in September 1925. Ralph Fowler , his research supervisor, had received a proof copy of an exploratory paper by Werner Heisenberg in the framework of the old quantum theory of Bohr and Sommerfeld . Heisenberg leaned heavily on Bohr's correspondence principle but changed the equations so that they involved directly observable quantities, leading to the matrix formulation of quantum mechanics. Fowler sent Heisenberg's paper on to Dirac, who

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3432-453: A one-year lectureship, at 7 times the salary that he had been drawing in Europe. Princeton recruited von Neumann at the same time. Jenő Pál Wigner and János von Neumann had collaborated on three papers together in 1928 and two in 1929. They anglicized their first names to "Eugene" and "John", respectively. When their year was up, Princeton offered a five-year contract as visiting professors for half

3588-406: A process of nyelvújítás ( language revitalization ). Some words were shortened ( győzedelem > győzelem , 'victory' or 'triumph'); a number of dialectal words spread nationally ( e.g. , cselleng 'dawdle'); extinct words were reintroduced ( dísz , 'décor'); a wide range of expressions were coined using the various derivative suffixes; and some other, less frequently used methods of expanding

3744-697: A professor of physics at Vassar College , who had completed her Ph.D. at Yale University in 1932. After the war she taught physics on the faculty of Rutgers University 's Douglass College in New Jersey until her retirement in 1964. They remained married until her death in November 1977. They had two children, David Wigner and Martha Wigner Upton. During the Manhattan Project, Wigner led a team that included J. Ernest Wilkins Jr. , Alvin M. Weinberg , Katharine Way , Gale Young and Edward Creutz . The group's task

3900-616: A rabbi. A fellow student was János von Neumann , who was a year behind Wigner. They both benefited from the instruction of the noted mathematics teacher László Rátz . In 1919, to escape the Béla Kun communist regime , the Wigner family briefly fled to Austria, returning to Hungary after Kun's downfall. Partly as a reaction to the prominence of Jews in the Kun regime, the family converted to Lutheranism . Wigner explained later in his life that his family decision to convert to Lutheranism "was not at heart

4056-426: A recent Woods Hole study's conclusion that a nuclear strike would kill 20% of Americans to be a very modest projection and that the country could recover from such an attack more quickly than Germany had recovered from the devastation of World War II. Wigner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 "for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles , particularly through

4212-586: A relativistic phenomenon. The necessity of fermions (matter) being created and destroyed in Enrico Fermi 's 1934 theory of beta decay led to a reinterpretation of Dirac's equation as a "classical" field equation for any point particle of spin ħ /2, itself subject to quantisation conditions involving anti-commutators . Thus reinterpreted, in 1934 by Werner Heisenberg , as a (quantum) field equation accurately describing all elementary matter particles – today quarks and leptons – this Dirac field equation

4368-586: A religious decision but an anti-communist one". After graduating from the secondary school in 1920, Wigner enrolled at the Budapest University of Technical Sciences , known as the Műegyetem . He was not happy with the courses on offer, and in 1921 enrolled at the Technische Hochschulein Berlin (now Technische Universität Berlin ), where he studied chemical engineering . He also attended

4524-462: A request from Arnold Sommerfeld to work at the University of Göttingen as an assistant to the great mathematician David Hilbert . This proved a disappointment, as the aged Hilbert's abilities were failing, and his interests had shifted to logic. Wigner nonetheless studied independently. He laid the foundation for the theory of symmetries in quantum mechanics and in 1927 introduced what is now known as

4680-408: A result modify the wave function of the "measured" physical system), an idea which has been called the " consciousness causes collapse " interpretation. Interestingly, Hugh Everett III (a student of Wigner's) discussed Wigner's thought experiment in the introductory part of his 1957 dissertation as an "amusing, but extremely hypothetical drama". In an early draft of Everett's work, one also finds

4836-1045: A similarly dramatic way over these three centuries. After the arrival of the Hungarians in the Carpathian Basin , the language came into contact with a variety of speech communities , among them Slavic , Turkic , and German . Turkic loans from this period come mainly from the Pechenegs and Cumanians , who settled in Hungary during the 12th and 13th centuries: e.g. koboz " cobza " (cf. Turkish kopuz 'lute'); komondor "mop dog" (< * kumandur < Cuman ). Hungarian borrowed 20% of words from neighbouring Slavic languages : e.g. tégla 'brick'; mák 'poppy seed'; szerda 'Wednesday'; csütörtök 'Thursday'...; karácsony 'Christmas'. These languages in turn borrowed words from Hungarian: e.g. Serbo-Croatian ašov from Hungarian ásó 'spade'. About 1.6 percent of

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4992-411: A simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible." Dirac himself wrote in his diary during his postgraduate years that he concentrated solely on his research, and stopped only on Sunday when he took long strolls alone. An anecdote recounted in a review of the 2009 biography tells of Werner Heisenberg and Dirac sailing on an ocean liner to

5148-407: A unit called a "dirac", which was one word per hour. When Niels Bohr complained that he did not know how to finish a sentence in a scientific article he was writing, Dirac replied, "I was taught at school never to start a sentence without knowing the end of it." He criticised the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer 's interest in poetry: "The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in

5304-530: A wide array of phenomena. Dirac was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge from 1932 to 1969. He conceived the Helikon vortex isotope separation process in 1934. In 1937, he proposed a speculative cosmological model based on the large numbers hypothesis . During World War II, he conducted important theoretical work on uranium enrichment by gas centrifuge . He introduced

5460-676: A wide range of disciplines. These included Richard Hamming in Computer Science, Arthur Lesk in Molecular Biology, Peter Norvig in data mining, Max Tegmark in Physics, Ivor Grattan-Guinness in Mathematics, and Vela Velupillai in Economics. Turning to philosophical questions about the theory of quantum mechanics, Wigner developed a thought experiment (later called Wigner's Friend paradox ) to illustrate his belief that consciousness

5616-488: A wider audience. In these works, Wigner laid the foundation for the theory of symmetries in quantum mechanics . Wigner's theorem , proven by him in 1931, is a cornerstone of the mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics . The theorem specifies how physical symmetries such as rotations, translations, and CPT symmetry are represented on the Hilbert space of states . According to the theorem, any symmetry transformation

5772-558: A £140 scholarship from the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research . Along with his £70 scholarship from St John's College, this was enough to live at Cambridge. There, Dirac pursued his interests in the theory of general relativity , an interest he had gained earlier as a student in Bristol, and in the nascent field of quantum physics , under the supervision of Ralph Fowler . From 1925 to 1928 he held an 1851 Research Fellowship from

5928-400: Is subject–verb–object (SVO). However, Hungarian is a topic-prominent language , and so has a word order that depends not only on syntax but also on the topic–comment structure of the sentence (for example, what aspect is assumed to be known and what is emphasized). A Hungarian sentence generally has the following order: topic, comment (or focus), verb and the rest. The topic shows that

6084-421: Is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality. The very idea of God is a product of the human imagination. It is quite understandable why primitive people, who were so much more exposed to the overpowering forces of nature than we are today, should have personified these forces in fear and trembling. But nowadays, when we understand so many natural processes, we have no need for such solutions. I can't for

6240-470: Is a landmark in the history of science . It quickly became one of the standard textbooks on the subject and is still used today. In that book, Dirac incorporated the previous work of Werner Heisenberg on matrix mechanics and of Erwin Schrödinger on wave mechanics into a single mathematical formalism that associates measurable quantities to operators acting on the Hilbert space of vectors that describe

6396-469: Is almost certain that life would not have started. And I feel that under those conditions it will be necessary to assume the existence of a god to start off life. I would like, therefore, to set up this connection between the existence of a god and the physical laws: if physical laws are such that to start off life involves an excessively small chance so that it will not be reasonable to suppose that life would have started just by blind chance, then there must be

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6552-579: Is always on the first syllable of a word, as in Finnish and the neighbouring Slovak and Czech . There is a secondary stress on other syllables in compounds: viszontlátásra ("goodbye") is pronounced /ˈvisontˌlaːtaːʃrɒ/ . Elongated vowels in non-initial syllables may seem to be stressed to an English-speaker, as length and stress correlate in English. Hungarian is an agglutinative language . It uses various affixes , mainly suffixes but also some prefixes and

6708-605: Is as central to theoretical physics as the Maxwell , Yang–Mills and Einstein field equations. Dirac is regarded as the founder of quantum electrodynamics , being the first to use that term. He also introduced the idea of vacuum polarisation in the early 1930s. This work was key to the development of quantum mechanics by the next generation of theorists, in particular Schwinger , Feynman , Sin-Itiro Tomonaga and Dyson in their formulation of quantum electrodynamics. Dirac's The Principles of Quantum Mechanics , published in 1930,

6864-549: Is expressed by a possessive suffix on the possessed object, rather than the possessor as in English (Peter's apple becomes Péter almája , literally 'Peter apple-his'). Noun plurals are formed with –k ( az almák 'the apples'), but after a numeral, the singular is used ( két alma 'two apples', literally 'two apple'; not *két almák ). Unlike English, Hungarian uses case suffixes and nearly always postpositions instead of prepositions. There are two types of articles in Hungarian, definite and indefinite, which roughly correspond to

7020-423: Is foundational to the quantum mechanical measurement process. He thereby followed an ontological approach that sets human's consciousness at the center: "All that quantum mechanics purports to provide are probability connections between subsequent impressions (also called 'apperceptions') of the consciousness". Measurements are understood as the interactions which create the impressions in our consciousness (and as

7176-466: Is just not sensible mathematics. Sensible mathematics involves neglecting a quantity when it is small – not neglecting it just because it is infinitely great and you do not want it!" His refusal to accept renormalisation resulted in his work on the subject moving increasingly out of the mainstream. Shin'ichirō Tomonaga , Schwinger and Feynman mastered this approach, producing a QED with unprecedented accuracy, resulting formal recognition by an award of

7332-442: Is marked with boldface. Hungarian has a four-tiered system for expressing levels of politeness. From highest to lowest: The four-tiered system has somewhat been eroded due to the recent expansion of " tegeződés " and " önözés ". Some anomalies emerged with the arrival of multinational companies who have addressed their customers in the te (least polite) form right from the beginning of their presence in Hungary. A typical example

7488-578: Is now frequently questioned. The name of Hungary could be a result of regular sound changes of Ungrian/Ugrian , and the fact that the Eastern Slavs referred to Hungarians as Ǫgry/Ǫgrove (sg. Ǫgrinŭ ) seemed to confirm that. Current literature favors the hypothesis that it comes from the name of the Turkic tribe Onoğur (which means ' ten arrows ' or ' ten tribes ' ). There are numerous regular sound correspondences between Hungarian and

7644-613: Is officially recognized as a minority or regional language in Austria , Croatia , Romania , Zakarpattia in Ukraine , and Slovakia . In Romania it is a recognized minority language used at local level in communes, towns and municipalities with an ethnic Hungarian population of over 20%. The dialects of Hungarian identified by Ethnologue are: Alföld, West Danube, Danube-Tisza, King's Pass Hungarian, Northeast Hungarian, Northwest Hungarian, Székely and West Hungarian. These dialects are, for

7800-424: Is represented by a linear and unitary or antilinear and antiunitary transformation of Hilbert space. The representation of a symmetry group on a Hilbert space is either an ordinary representation or a projective representation . In the late 1930s, Wigner extended his research into atomic nuclei. By 1929, his papers were drawing notice in the world of physics. In 1930, Princeton University recruited Wigner for

7956-522: Is seen as having anticipated string theory , with his work on the Dirac membrane and Dirac–Born–Infeld action , both of which he proposed in a 1962 paper, along with other contributions. He also developed a general theory of the quantum field with dynamical constraints, which forms the basis of the gauge theories and superstring theories of today. Shortly after Wolfgang Pauli proposed his Pauli exclusion principle that two electrons cannot occupy

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8112-399: Is sometimes described as having free word order, different word orders are generally not interchangeable, and the neutral order is not always correct to use. The intonation is also different with different topic-comment structures. The topic usually has a rising intonation, the focus having a falling intonation. In the following examples, the topic is marked with italics, and the focus (comment)

8268-475: Is the Funeral Sermon and Prayer , which dates to the 1190s. Although the orthography of these early texts differed considerably from that used today, contemporary Hungarians can still understand a great deal of the reconstructed spoken language, despite changes in grammar and vocabulary. A more extensive body of Hungarian literature arose after 1300. The earliest known example of Hungarian religious poetry

8424-693: Is the 14th-century Lamentations of Mary . The first Bible translation was the Hussite Bible in the 1430s. The standard language lost its diphthongs , and several postpositions transformed into suffixes , including reá "onto" (the phrase utu rea "onto the way" found in the 1055 text would later become út ra ). There were also changes in the system of vowel harmony . At one time, Hungarian used six verb tenses , while today only two or three are used. In 1533, Kraków printer Benedek Komjáti published Letters of St. Paul in Hungarian (modern orthography: A Szent Pál levelei magyar nyelven ),

8580-523: Is the Swedish furniture shop IKEA , whose web site and other publications address the customers in te form. When a news site asked IKEA—using the te form—why they address their customers this way, IKEA's PR Manager explained in his answer—using the ön form—that their way of communication reflects IKEA's open-mindedness and the Swedish culture. However IKEA in France uses the polite ( vous ) form. Another example

8736-485: Is the communication of Yettel Hungary (earlier Telenor, a mobile network operator) towards its customers. Yettel chose to communicate towards business customers in the polite ön form while all other customers are addressed in the less polite te form. During the first early phase of Hungarian language reforms (late 18th and early 19th centuries) more than ten thousand words were coined, several thousand of which are still actively used today (see also Ferenc Kazinczy ,

8892-407: Is unmarked ( az alma 'the apple') and, for example, the accusative is marked with the suffix –t ( az almát '[I eat] the apple'). Half of the cases express a combination of the source-location-target and surface-inside-proximity ternary distinctions (three times three cases); there is a separate case ending – ból / –ből meaning a combination of source and insideness: 'from inside of'. Possession

9048-525: The Bishopston area of the city. His father, Charles Adrien Ladislas Dirac, was an immigrant from Saint-Maurice, Switzerland , of French descent, who worked in Bristol as a French teacher. His mother, Florence Hannah Dirac, née Holten, was born to a Cornish Methodist family in Liskeard , Cornwall . She was named after Florence Nightingale by her father, a ship's captain, who had met Nightingale while he

9204-463: The Compton effect he wrote, "I don't understand the details of Dirac at all." In 1987, Abdus Salam declared that "Dirac was undoubtedly one of the greatest physicists of this or any century . . . No man except Einstein has had such a decisive influence, in so short a time, on the course of physics in this century." In 1995, Stephen Hawking stated that "Dirac has done more than anyone this century, with

9360-456: The Dirac equation as a relativistic equation of motion for the wave function of the electron . This work led Dirac to predict the existence of the positron , the electron's antiparticle , which he interpreted in terms of what came to be called the Dirac sea . The positron was observed by Carl Anderson in 1932. Dirac's equation also contributed to explaining the origin of quantum spin as

9516-423: The Dirac membrane and Dirac–Born–Infeld action , along with other contributions important to modern-day string and gauge theories. Dirac was regarded by his friends and colleagues as unusual in character. In a 1926 letter to Paul Ehrenfest , Albert Einstein wrote of a Dirac paper, "I am toiling over Dirac. This balancing on the dizzying path between genius and madness is awful." In another letter concerning

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9672-895: The Enrico Fermi award in 1958, the Atoms for Peace Award in 1959, the Max Planck Medal in 1961, the National Medal of Science in 1969, the Albert Einstein Award in 1972, the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1974, the eponymous Wigner Medal in 1978, and the Herzl Prize in 1982. In 1968 he gave the Josiah Willard Gibbs lecture. After his retirement from Princeton in 1971, Wigner prepared

9828-498: The Heisenberg picture of quantum theory; his primary point in the article was that the Schrödinger model does not work for this purpose. In 1928, building on 2×2 spin matrices which he purported to have discovered independently of Wolfgang Pauli 's work on non-relativistic spin systems (Dirac told Abraham Pais , "I believe I got these [matrices] independently of Pauli and possibly Pauli got these independently of me."), he proposed

9984-575: The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. Weissenberg wanted someone to assist him with his work on X-ray crystallography , and Polanyi had recommended Wigner. After six months as Weissenberg's assistant, Wigner went to work for Richard Becker for two semesters. Wigner explored quantum mechanics , studying the work of Erwin Schrödinger . He also delved into the group theory of Ferdinand Frobenius and Eduard Ritter von Weber . Wigner received

10140-523: The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry (now the Fritz Haber Institute ), and there he met Michael Polanyi , who became, after László Rátz , Wigner's greatest teacher. Polanyi supervised Wigner's DSc thesis, Bildung und Zerfall von Molekülen ("Formation and Decay of Molecules"). Wigner returned to Budapest, where he went to work at his father's tannery, but in 1926, he accepted an offer from Karl Weissenberg at

10296-599: The Mansi and Khanty languages of western Siberia ( Khanty–Mansia region of North Asia ), but it is no longer clear that it is a valid group. When the Samoyed languages were determined to be part of the family, it was thought at first that Finnic and Ugric (the most divergent branches within Finno-Ugric) were closer to each other than to the Samoyed branch of the family, but that

10452-614: The Romanian lexicon is of Hungarian origin. In the 21st century, studies support an origin of the Uralic languages, including early Hungarian, in eastern or central Siberia , somewhere between the Ob and Yenisei rivers or near the Sayan mountains in the Russian – Mongolian border region. A 2019 study based on genetics, archaeology and linguistics, found that early Uralic speakers arrived in Europe from

10608-609: The Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 . He completed his PhD in June 1926 with the first thesis on quantum mechanics to be submitted anywhere. He then continued his research in Copenhagen and Göttingen . In the spring of 1929, he was a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison . In 1937, Dirac married Margit Wigner, a sister of physicist Eugene Wigner and

10764-597: The Tube Alloys project , the British programme to research and construct atomic bombs during World War II. Dirac made fundamental contributions to the process of uranium enrichment and the gas centrifuge , and whose work was deemed to be "probably the most important theoretical result in centrifuge technology". He also contributed to cosmology , putting forth his large numbers hypothesis . Dirac also anticipated string theory well before its inception, with work such as

10920-512: The United States and Canada ) and Israel . With 14 million speakers, it is the Uralic family's largest member by number of speakers. Hungarian is a member of the Uralic language family . Linguistic connections between Hungarian and other Uralic languages were noticed in the 1670s, and the family itself was established in 1717. Hungarian has traditionally been assigned to the Ugric branch along with

11076-464: The University of Bristol with a first class honours Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering in 1921, and a first class honours Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics in 1923. Dirac then graduated from the University of Cambridge with a PhD in physics in 1926, writing the first ever thesis on quantum mechanics. Dirac made fundamental contributions to the early development of both quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics , coining

11232-516: The University of Wisconsin . There, he met his first wife, Amelia Frank, who was a physics student there. However, she died unexpectedly in 1937, leaving Wigner distraught. He therefore accepted an offer in 1938 from Princeton to return there. Wigner became a naturalized citizen of the United States on January 8, 1937, and he brought his parents to the United States. Although he was a professed political amateur, on August 2, 1939, he participated in

11388-832: The Volga River and the Ural Mountains . The Onoğurs (and Bulgars ) later had a great influence on the language, especially between the 5th and 9th centuries. This layer of Turkic loans is large and varied (e.g. szó ' word ' , from Turkic ; and daru ' crane ' , from the related Permic languages ), and includes words borrowed from Oghur Turkic ; e.g. borjú ' calf ' (cf. Chuvash păru , părăv vs. Turkish buzağı ); dél 'noon; south' (cf. Chuvash tĕl vs. Turkish dial. düš ). Many words related to agriculture, state administration and even family relationships show evidence of such backgrounds. Hungarian syntax and grammar were not influenced in

11544-516: The Wigner D-matrix . Wigner and Hermann Weyl were responsible for introducing group theory into quantum mechanics. The latter had written a standard text, Group Theory and Quantum Mechanics (1928), but it was not easy to understand, especially for younger physicists. Wigner's Group Theory and Its Application to the Quantum Mechanics of Atomic Spectra (1931) made group theory accessible to

11700-470: The quantisation rules in a novel and more illuminating manner . For this work, published in 1926, Dirac received a PhD from Cambridge. This formed the basis for Fermi–Dirac statistics that applies to systems consisting of many identical spin 1/2 particles (i.e. that obey the Pauli exclusion principle ), e.g. electrons in solids and liquids, and importantly to the field of conduction in semi-conductors . Dirac

11856-567: The separative work unit (SWU) in 1941. He contributed to the Tube Alloys project , the British programme to research and construct atomic bombs during World War II. Dirac's quantum electrodynamics (QED) included terms with infinite self-energy . A workaround known as renormalisation was developed, but Dirac never accepted this. "I must say that I am very dissatisfied with the situation", he said in 1975, "because this so-called 'good theory' does involve neglecting infinities which appear in its equations, neglecting them in an arbitrary way. This

12012-514: The 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics with Erwin Schrödinger for "the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory ". He was the youngest ever theoretician to win the prize until T. D. Lee in 1957. Dirac also contributed greatly to the reconciliation of general relativity with quantum mechanics. His 1930 monograph, The Principles of Quantum Mechanics , is one of the most influential texts on quantum mechanics. Dirac's contributions were not restricted to quantum mechanics. He contributed to

12168-567: The 1950s, he would even work for DuPont on the Savannah River Site . Wigner did not regret working on the bomb, remarking: In fact, my regret is that it was not done sooner. If we had begun trying seriously to control fission in 1939, we might have had an atomic bomb by the Winter of 1943-1944. At that time Stalin's army was still bottled up in Stalingrad. By the middle of 1945, when we first used

12324-872: The 2011 Hungarian census, 9,896,333 people (99.6% of the total population) speak Hungarian, of whom 9,827,875 people (98.9%) speak it as a first language, while 68,458 people (0.7%) speak it as a second language . About 2.2 million speakers live in other areas that were part of the Kingdom of Hungary before the Treaty of Trianon (1920). Of these, the largest group lives in Transylvania , the western half of present-day Romania , where there are approximately 1.25 million Hungarians . There are large Hungarian communities also in Slovakia , Serbia and Ukraine , and Hungarians can also be found in Austria , Croatia , and Slovenia , as well as about

12480-554: The AEC discovered that Wigner's scientists were conducting experiments with a critical mass of uranium-235 when the director of the Manhattan Project, Major General Leslie R. Groves, Jr. , had forbidden such experiments in August 1946 after the death of Louis Slotin at the Los Alamos Laboratory . Wigner argued that Groves's order had been superseded, but was forced to terminate the experiments, which were completely different from

12636-725: The Clinton Laboratory (now the Oak Ridge National Laboratory ) in early 1946, but became frustrated with bureaucratic interference by the Atomic Energy Commission , and returned to Princeton. In the postwar period, he served on a number of government bodies, including the National Bureau of Standards from 1947 to 1951, the mathematics panel of the National Research Council from 1951 to 1954,

12792-559: The Finno-Ugric hypothesis was concluded the sounder of the two, mainly based on work by the German linguist Josef Budenz . Hungarians did, in fact, absorb some Turkic influences during several centuries of cohabitation. The influence on Hungarians was mainly from the Turkic Oghur speakers such as Sabirs , Bulgars of Atil , Kabars and Khazars . The Oghur tribes are often connected with

12948-463: The Hungarian lexemes collected from technical texts, dialects etc. would total up to 1,000,000 words. Parts of the lexicon can be organized using word-bushes (see an example on the right). The words in these bushes share a common root, are related through inflection, derivation and compounding, and are usually broadly related in meaning. Paul Dirac Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac ( / d ɪ ˈ r æ k / ; 8 August 1902 – 20 October 1984)

13104-524: The Hungarian language contains 75,000 words, and the Comprehensive Dictionary of Hungarian Language (to be published in 18 volumes in the next twenty years) is planned to contain 110,000 words. The default Hungarian lexicon is usually estimated to comprise 60,000 to 100,000 words. (Independently of specific languages, speakers actively use at most 10,000 to 20,000 words, with an average intellectual using 25,000 to 30,000 words. ) However, all

13260-505: The Hungarians whose exoethnonym is usually derived from Onogurs (> (H)ungars), a Turkic tribal confederation . The similarity between customs of Hungarians and the Chuvash people , the only surviving member of the Oghur tribes, is visible. For example, the Hungarians appear to have learned animal husbandry techniques from the Oghur speaking Chuvash people (or historically Suvar people ), as

13416-401: The Manhattan Project, he led a team whose task was to design nuclear reactors to convert uranium into weapons grade plutonium . At the time, reactors existed only on paper, and no reactor had yet gone critical . Wigner was disappointed that DuPont was given responsibility for the detailed design of the reactors, not just their construction. He became director of research and development at

13572-672: The Nobel Prize for physics. In the 1950s in his search for a better QED, Paul Dirac developed the Hamiltonian theory of constraints based on lectures that he delivered at the 1949 International Mathematical Congress in Canada. Dirac had also solved the problem of putting the Schwinger–Tomonaga equation into the Schrödinger representation and given explicit expressions for the scalar meson field ( spin zero pion or pseudoscalar meson ),

13728-732: The US in 1979 to "fill the critical gap caused by the crippling of the FBI , the disabling of the House Un-American Activities Committee and the destruction of crucial government files". Wigner died of pneumonia at the University Medical Center in Princeton, New Jersey on 1 January 1995. Hungarian language It is also spoken by Hungarian diaspora communities worldwide, especially in North America (particularly

13884-448: The Ugric and Finnic languages is greater, but the correspondences are also regular. The traditional view holds that the Hungarian language diverged from its Ugric relatives in the first half of the 1st millennium BC, in western Siberia east of the southern Urals . In Hungarian, Iranian loanwords date back to the time immediately following the breakup of Ugric and probably span well over

14040-527: The United States, where he obtained citizenship in 1937. Wigner participated in a meeting with Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein that resulted in the Einstein–Szilard letter , which prompted President Franklin D. Roosevelt to authorize the creation of the Advisory Committee on Uranium with the purpose of investigating the feasibility of nuclear weapons . Wigner was afraid that the German nuclear weapon project would develop an atomic bomb first. During

14196-519: The Wednesday afternoon colloquia of the German Physical Society . These colloquia featured leading researchers including Max Planck , Max von Laue , Rudolf Ladenburg , Werner Heisenberg , Walther Nernst , Wolfgang Pauli , and Albert Einstein . Wigner also met the physicist Leó Szilárd , who at once became Wigner's closest friend. A third experience in Berlin was formative. Wigner worked at

14352-490: The bomb, they had already overrun much of Central Europe. The Yalta Conference would have produced a document much less favourable to Russia, and even Communist China might have been set back. So I do not regret helping to build the bomb. An important discovery Wigner made during the project was the Wigner effect . This is a swelling of the graphite moderator caused by the displacement of atoms by neutron radiation . The Wigner effect

14508-476: The children were officially Swiss nationals until they became naturalised on 22 October 1919. Dirac's father was strict and authoritarian, although he disapproved of corporal punishment. Dirac had a strained relationship with his father, so much so that after his father's death, Dirac wrote, "I feel much freer now, and I am my own man." Charles forced his children to speak to him only in French so that they might learn

14664-495: The discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles". A graduate of the Technical Hochschule Berlin (now Technische Universität Berlin), Wigner worked as an assistant to Karl Weissenberg and Richard Becker at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, and David Hilbert at the University of Göttingen . Wigner and Hermann Weyl were responsible for introducing group theory into physics, particularly

14820-473: The discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles". The prize was shared that year, with the other half of the award divided between Maria Goeppert-Mayer and J. Hans D. Jensen . Wigner professed that he had never considered the possibility that this might occur, and added: "I never expected to get my name in the newspapers without doing something wicked." He also won the Franklin Medal in 1950,

14976-461: The east, specifically from eastern Siberia. Hungarian historian and archaeologist Gyula László claims that geological data from pollen analysis seems to contradict the placing of the ancient Hungarian homeland near the Urals. Today, the consensus among linguists is that Hungarian is a member of the Uralic family of languages. The classification of Hungarian as a Uralic/Finno-Ugric rather than

15132-446: The entrance examination for St John's College, Cambridge . He passed and was awarded a £70 scholarship, but this fell short of the amount of money required to live and study at Cambridge. Despite having graduated with a first class honours Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering, the economic climate of the post-war depression was such that he was unable to find work as an engineer. Instead, he took up an offer to study for

15288-407: The equations of motion. There are four constraints or weak equations for each point of the surface x 0 {\displaystyle x^{0}} = constant. Three of them H r {\displaystyle H_{r}} form the four vector density in the surface. The fourth H L {\displaystyle H_{L}} is a 3-dimensional scalar density in

15444-630: The equivalents in English. Adjectives precede nouns ( a piros alma 'the red apple') and have three degrees: positive ( piros 'red'), comparative ( pirosabb 'redder') and superlative ( a legpirosabb 'the reddest'). If the noun takes the plural or a case, an attributive adjective is invariable: a piros almák 'the red apples'. However, a predicative adjective agrees with the noun: az almák piros ak 'the apples are red'. Adjectives by themselves can behave as nouns (and so can take case suffixes): Melyik almát kéred? – A piros at . 'Which apple would you like? – The red one'. The neutral word order

15600-525: The exception of Einstein, to advance physics and change our picture of the universe". Antonino Zichichi asserted that Dirac had a greater impact on modern physics than Einstein, while Stanley Deser remarked that "We all stand on Dirac's shoulders." Dirac is widely considered to be on par with Sir Isaac Newton , James Clerk Maxwell , and Einstein. Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was born at his parents' home in Bristol , England, on 8 August 1902, and grew up in

15756-419: The first Hungarian-language book set in movable type . By the 17th century, the language already closely resembled its present-day form, although two of the past tenses remained in use. German, Italian and French loans also began to appear. Further Turkish words were borrowed during the period of Ottoman rule (1541 to 1699). In the 19th century, a group of writers, most notably Ferenc Kazinczy , spearheaded

15912-566: The first edition of Symmetries and Reflections, a collection of philosophical essays, and became more involved in international and political meetings; around this time he became a leader and vocal defender of the Unification Church 's annual International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences . Mary died in November 1977. In 1979, Wigner married his third wife, Eileen Clare-Patton (Pat) Hamilton,

16068-401: The forces of nature, alongside creating quantum electrodynamics and coining the term. He proposed and investigated the concept of a magnetic monopole , an object not yet known empirically, as a means of bringing even greater symmetry to James Clerk Maxwell 's equations of electromagnetism . Dirac also coined the terms " fermion " and " boson ". Throughout his career, Dirac was motivated by

16224-490: The foundations for Richard Feynman 's development of a completely new approach to quantum mechanics, the path integral formulation . In a 1963 paper, Dirac initiated the study of field theory on anti-de Sitter space (AdS) . The paper contains the mathematics of combining special relativity with the quantum mechanics of quarks inside hadrons, and lays the foundations of two-mode squeezed states that are essential to modern quantum optics , though Dirac did not realize it at

16380-409: The girls are nice? ' " Margit Dirac told both George Gamow and Anton Capri in the 1960s that her husband had said to a house visitor, "Allow me to present Wigner's sister, who is now my wife." Another story told of Dirac is that when he first met the young Richard Feynman at a conference, he said after a long silence, "I have an equation. Do you have one too?" After he presented a lecture at

16536-509: The gravitational field. His work laid the foundations for canonical quantum gravity . In his 1959 lecture at the Lindau Meetings , Dirac discussed why gravitational waves have "physical significance". Dirac predicted gravitational waves would have well defined energy density in 1964. Dirac reintroduced the term " graviton " in a number of lectures in 1959, noting that the energy of the gravitational field should come in quanta. Dirac

16692-435: The illusion that a kindly God rewards—in heaven if not on earth—all those who have not risen up against injustice, who have done their duty quietly and uncomplainingly. That is precisely why the honest assertion that God is a mere product of the human imagination is branded as the worst of all mortal sins. Heisenberg's view was tolerant. Pauli, raised as a Catholic, had kept silent after some initial remarks, but when finally he

16848-623: The laboratory, with James Lum handling the administrative chores as executive director. When the newly created Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) took charge of the laboratory's operations at the start of 1947, Wigner feared that many of the technical decisions would be made in Washington. He also saw the Army's continuation of wartime security policies at the laboratory as a "meddlesome oversight", interfering with research. One such incident occurred in March 1947, when

17004-477: The language holds official status nationally in Hungary and regionally in Romania , Slovakia , Serbia , Austria and Slovenia . In 2014 The proportion of Transylvanian students studying Hungarian exceeded the proportion of Hungarian students, which shows that the effects of Romanianization are slowly getting reversed and regaining popularity. The Dictate of Trianon resulted in a high proportion of Hungarians in

17160-436: The language were utilized. This movement produced more than ten thousand words, most of which are used actively today. The 19th and 20th centuries saw further standardization of the language, and differences between mutually comprehensible dialects gradually diminished. In 1920, Hungary signed the Treaty of Trianon , losing 71 percent of its territory and one-third of the ethnic Hungarian population along with it. Today,

17316-517: The language. When Dirac found that he could not express what he wanted to say in French, he chose to remain silent. Dirac was educated first at Bishop Road Primary School and then at the all-boys Merchant Venturers' Technical College (later Cotham School ), where his father was a French teacher. The school was an institution attached to the University of Bristol , which shared grounds and staff. It emphasised technical subjects like bricklaying, shoemaking and metalwork, and modern languages. This

17472-411: The latter term. Among other discoveries, he formulated the Dirac equation in 1928, which describes the behaviour of fermions and predicted the existence of antimatter , which is one of the most important equations in physics, and is regarded by some physicists as the "real seed of modern physics". He wrote a famous paper in 1931, which further predicted the existence of antimatter. Dirac shared

17628-489: The leading figure of the Hungarian language reforms.) Kazinczy's chief goal was to replace existing words of German and Latin origins with newly created Hungarian words. As a result, Kazinczy and his later followers (the reformers) significantly reduced the formerly high ratio of words of Latin and German origins in the Hungarian language, which were related to social sciences, natural sciences, politics and economics, institutional names, fashion etc. Giving an accurate estimate for

17784-428: The life of me see how the postulate of an Almighty God helps us in any way. What I do see is that this assumption leads to such unproductive questions as to why God allows so much misery and injustice, the exploitation of the poor by the rich, and all the other horrors He might have prevented. If religion is still being taught, it is by no means because its ideas still convince us, but simply because some of us want to keep

17940-499: The lower classes quiet. Quiet people are much easier to govern than clamorous and dissatisfied ones. They are also much easier to exploit. Religion is a kind of opium that allows a nation to lull itself into wishful dreams and so forget the injustices that are being perpetrated against the people. Hence the close alliance between those two great political forces, the State and the Church. Both need

18096-471: The mass in the theory of Abraham-Lorentz electron, leading to the Abraham–Lorentz–Dirac force , which is the relativistic-classical electron model; however, this model has solutions that suggest force increase exponentially with time. Fermi's golden rule , the formula for computing quantum transitions in time dependent systems, declared a "golden rule" by Enrico Fermi , was derived by Dirac. Dirac

18252-448: The medium of writing used at the time, wood, is perishable. The Kingdom of Hungary was founded in 1000 by Stephen I . The country became a Western -styled Christian ( Roman Catholic ) state, with Latin script replacing Hungarian runes . The earliest remaining fragments of the language are found in the establishing charter of the abbey of Tihany from 1055, intermingled with Latin text. The first extant text fully written in Hungarian

18408-574: The most part, mutually intelligible . The Hungarian Csángó dialect, which is mentioned but not listed separately by Ethnologue, is spoken primarily in Bacău County in eastern Romania. The Csángó Hungarian group has been largely isolated from other Hungarian people , and therefore preserved features that closely resemble earlier forms of Hungarian. Hungarian has 14 vowel phonemes and 25 consonant phonemes. The vowel phonemes can be grouped as pairs of short and long vowels such as o and ó . Most of

18564-548: The name of the country, " Magyarország " (Hungary), pronounced /ˈmɒɟɒrorsaːɡ/ . It is one of three palatal consonants, the others being ⟨ty⟩ and ⟨ny⟩ . Historically a fourth palatalized consonant ʎ existed, still written ⟨ly⟩ . A single 'r' is pronounced as an alveolar tap ( akkora 'of that size'), but a double 'r' is pronounced as an alveolar trill ( akkorra 'by that time'), like in Spanish and Italian . Primary stress

18720-407: The new information for the listeners that may not have been known or that their knowledge must be corrected. For example, "Én vagyok az apád". ('I am your father'. Literally, 'It is I who am your father'.), from the movie The Empire Strikes Back , the pronoun I ( én ) is in the focus and implies that it is new information, and the listener thought that someone else is his father. Although Hungarian

18876-437: The one that killed Slotin. Feeling unsuited to a managerial role in such an environment, he left Oak Ridge in 1947 and returned to Princeton University, although he maintained a consulting role with the facility for many years. In the postwar period, he served on a number of government bodies, including the National Bureau of Standards from 1947 to 1951, the mathematics panel of the National Research Council from 1951 to 1954,

19032-443: The other Ugric languages. For example, Hungarian /aː/ corresponds to Khanty /o/ in certain positions, and Hungarian /h/ corresponds to Khanty /x/ , while Hungarian final /z/ corresponds to Khanty final /t/ . For example, Hungarian ház [haːz] ' house ' vs. Khanty xot [xot] ' house ' , and Hungarian száz [saːz] ' hundred ' vs. Khanty sot [sot] ' hundred ' . The distance between

19188-478: The pairs have an almost similar pronunciation and vary significantly only in their duration. However, pairs a / á and e / é differ both in closedness and length. Consonant length is also distinctive in Hungarian. Most consonant phonemes can occur as geminates . The sound voiced palatal plosive /ɟ/ , written ⟨gy⟩ , sounds similar to 'd' in British English 'duty'. It occurs in

19344-443: The past: It could be that it is extremely difficult to start life . It might be that it is so difficult to start a life that it has happened only once among all the planets... Let us consider, just as a conjecture, that the chance of life starting when we have got suitable physical conditions is 10 . I don't have any logical reason for proposing this figure, I just want you to consider it as a possibility. Under those conditions ... it

19500-564: The philosophy of mathematics and of physics, which has become his best-known work outside 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 original paper has provoked and inspired many responses across

19656-489: The physics panel of the National Science Foundation , and the influential General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission from 1952 to 1957 and again from 1959 to 1964. He also contributed to civil defense . Wigner was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1950. Near the end of his life, Wigner's thoughts turned more philosophical. In 1960, he published a now classic article on

19812-593: The physics panel of the National Science Foundation , and the influential General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission from 1952 to 1957 and again from 1959 to 1964. In later life, he became more philosophical, and published The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences , his best-known work outside technical mathematics and physics. Wigner Jenő Pál was born in Budapest , Austria-Hungary on November 17, 1902, to middle class Jewish parents, Elisabeth Elsa Einhorn and Antal Anton Wigner,

19968-422: The principles of mathematical beauty , with Peter Goddard stating that "Dirac cited mathematical beauty as the ultimate criterion for selecting the way forward in theoretical physics". Dirac was recognised for being mathematically gifted, as during his time in university, academics had affirmed that Dirac had an "ability of the highest order in mathematical physics", with Ebenezer Cunningham stating that Dirac

20124-411: The proposition is only for that particular thing or aspect, and it implies that the proposition is not true for some others. For example, in " Az almát János látja". ('It is John who sees the apple'. Literally 'The apple John sees.'), the apple is in the topic, implying that other objects may be seen by not him but other people (the pear may be seen by Peter). The topic part may be empty. The focus shows

20280-413: The relativistic equation for the electron, which now bears his name. The remarkable notion of an antiparticle to each fermion particle – e.g. the positron as antiparticle to the electron – stems from his equation. He is credited as being the one to create quantum field theory , which underlies all theoretical work on sub-atomic or "elementary" particles today, work that is fundamental to our understanding of

20436-459: The same quantum energy level, Enrico Fermi and Dirac both realized the principle would dramatically alter the statistical mechanics of electron systems. This work became the basis for Fermi–Dirac statistics . Dirac wrote an influential paper in 1933 regarding the Lagrangian in quantum mechanics. The paper served as the basis for Julian Schwinger and his quantum action principle , and laid

20592-550: The state of a physical system . The book also introduced the Dirac delta function . Following his 1939 article, he also included the bra–ket notation in the third edition of his book, thereby contributing to its universal use nowadays. In 1931, Dirac proposed that the existence of a single magnetic monopole in the universe would suffice to explain the quantisation of electrical charge. No such monopole has been detected, despite numerous attempts and preliminary claims. (see also Searches for magnetic monopoles ). Dirac quantised

20748-486: The surface H L ≈ 0; H r ≈ 0 ( r = 1, 2, 3) In the late 1950s, he applied the Hamiltonian methods he had developed to cast Einstein's general relativity in Hamiltonian form and to bring to a technical completion the quantisation problem of gravitation and bring it also closer to the rest of physics according to Salam and DeWitt. In 1959 he also gave an invited talk on "Energy of the Gravitational Field" at

20904-441: The surface on which the state is considered. The g m 0 {\displaystyle g_{m0}} ( m = 0, 1, 2, 3) appear in the theory only through the variables g r 0 {\displaystyle g^{r0}} , ( − g 00 ) − 1 / 2 {\displaystyle (-{g^{00}})^{-1/2}} which occur as arbitrary coefficients in

21060-414: The surrounding 7 countries, so it is widely spoken or understood. Although host countries are not always considerate of Hungarian language users, communities are strong. The Szeklers , for example, form their own region and have their own national museum, educational institutions, and hospitals. Hungarian has about 13 million native speakers, of whom more than 9.8 million live in Hungary. According to

21216-445: The theory of symmetry in physics . Along the way he performed ground-breaking work in pure mathematics, in which he authored a number of mathematical theorems . In particular, Wigner's theorem is a cornerstone in the mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics . He is also known for his research into the structure of the atomic nucleus . In 1930, Princeton University recruited Wigner, along with John von Neumann , and he moved to

21372-432: The time, his memory of Poisson brackets was rather vague, but he found E. T. Whittaker 's Analytical Dynamics of Particles and Rigid Bodies illuminating. From his new understanding, he developed a quantum theory based on non-commuting dynamical variables. This led him to the most profound and significant general formulation of quantum mechanics to date. His novel formulation using Dirac brackets allowed him to obtain

21528-468: The time. Dirac previously worked on AdS during the 1930s, publishing a paper in 1935. In 1930, Victor Weisskopf and Eugene Wigner published their famous and now standard calculation of spontaneous radiation emission in atomic and molecular physics. Remarkably, in a letter to Niels Bohr in February 1927, Dirac had come to the same calculation, but he did not publish it. In 1938, Dirac renormalized

21684-517: The total word count is difficult, since it is hard to define a "word" in agglutinating languages, due to the existence of affixed words and compound words. To obtain a meaningful definition of compound words, it is necessary to exclude compounds whose meaning is the mere sum of its elements. The largest dictionaries giving translations from Hungarian to another language contain 120,000 words and phrases (but this may include redundant phrases as well, because of translation issues) . The new desk lexicon of

21840-406: The universe. Our feeble attempts at mathematics enable us to understand a bit of the universe, and as we proceed to develop higher and higher mathematics we can hope to understand the universe better. In 1971, at a conference meeting, Dirac expressed his views on the existence of God. Dirac explained that the existence of God could be justified only if an improbable event were to have taken place in

21996-522: The vector meson field (spin one rho meson), and the electromagnetic field (spin one massless boson, photon). The Hamiltonian of constrained systems is one of Dirac's many masterpieces. It is a powerful generalisation of Hamiltonian theory that remains valid for curved spacetime. The equations for the Hamiltonian involve only six degrees of freedom described by g r s {\displaystyle g_{rs}} , p r s {\displaystyle p^{rs}} for each point of

22152-477: The widow of physicist Donald Ross Hamilton, the dean of the graduate school at Princeton University, who had died in 1972. In 1992, at the age of 90, he published his memoirs, The Recollections of Eugene P. Wigner with Andrew Szanton . In it, 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

22308-492: The world's first atomic reactor, Chicago Pile One (CP-1) achieved a controlled nuclear chain reaction . Wigner was disappointed that DuPont was given responsibility for the detailed design of the reactors, not just their construction. He threatened to resign in February 1943, but was talked out of it by the head of the Metallurgical Laboratory , Arthur Compton , who sent him on vacation instead. As it turned out,

22464-526: The year. The Technische Hochschule responded with a teaching assignment for the other half of the year. This was very timely, since the Nazis soon rose to power in Germany. At Princeton in 1934, Wigner introduced his sister Margit "Manci" Wigner to the physicist Paul Dirac , with whom she remarried. Princeton did not rehire Wigner when his contract ran out in 1936. Through Gregory Breit , Wigner found new employment at

22620-427: Was "quite the most original student I have met in the subject of mathematical physics". Therefore, Dirac was known for his "astounding physical intuition combined with the ability to invent new mathematics to create new physics". During his career, Dirac made numerous important contributions to mathematical subjects, including the Dirac delta function , Dirac algebra and the Dirac operator . Dirac's first step into

22776-560: Was a serious problem for the reactors at the Hanford Site in the immediate post-war period, and resulted in production cutbacks and a reactor being shut down entirely. It was eventually discovered that it could be overcome by controlled heating and annealing. Through Manhattan project funding, Wigner and Leonard Eisenbud also developed an important general approach to nuclear reactions, the Wigner–Eisenbud R-matrix theory, which

22932-727: Was a soldier during the Crimean war. His mother moved to Bristol as a young woman, where she worked as a librarian at the Bristol Central Library ; despite this she still considered her identity to be Cornish rather than English. Paul had a younger sister, Béatrice Isabelle Marguerite, known as Betty, and an older brother, Reginald Charles Félix, known as Felix, who died by suicide in March 1925. Dirac later recalled: "My parents were terribly distressed. I didn't know they cared so much ... I never knew that parents were supposed to care for their children, but from then on I knew." Charles and

23088-426: Was an English mathematical and theoretical physicist who is considered to be one of the founders of quantum mechanics . Dirac laid the foundations for both quantum electrodynamics and quantum field theory . He was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge , a professor of physics at Florida State University , and a 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics recipient. Dirac graduated from

23244-506: Was asked for his opinion, said: "Well, our friend Dirac has got a religion and its guiding principle is 'There is no God, and Paul Dirac is His prophet. ' " Everybody, including Dirac, burst into laughter. Later in life, Dirac wrote an article mentioning God that appeared in the May 1963 edition of Scientific American , Dirac wrote: It seems to be one of the fundamental features of nature that fundamental physical laws are described in terms of

23400-409: Was famously not bothered by issues of interpretation in quantum theory . In fact, in a paper published in a book in his honour, he wrote: "The interpretation of quantum mechanics has been dealt with by many authors, and I do not want to discuss it here. I want to deal with more fundamental things." However, in 1964 he wrote a short article about the interpretation of quantum field theory when based on

23556-466: Was on vacation in Bristol, asking him to look into this paper carefully. Dirac's attention was drawn to a mysterious mathematical relationship, at first sight unintelligible, that Heisenberg had established. Several weeks later, back in Cambridge, Dirac suddenly recognised that this mathematical form had the same structure as the Poisson brackets that occur in the classical dynamics of particle motion. At

23712-615: Was published in 1947. Wigner was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1944 and the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1945. He accepted a position as the director of research and development at the Clinton Laboratory (now the Oak Ridge National Laboratory ) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee in early 1946. Because he did not want to be involved in administrative duties, he became co-director of

23868-416: Was the first to write down, the "Heisenberg equation of motion". Most physicists speak of Fermi–Dirac statistics for half-integer-spin particles and Bose–Einstein statistics for integer-spin particles. While lecturing later in life, Dirac always insisted on calling the former "Fermi statistics". He referred to the latter as "Bose statistics" for reasons, he explained, of "symmetry". Heisenberg recollected

24024-407: Was the one to initiate the development of time-dependent perturbation theory in his early work on semi-classical atoms interacting with an electromagnetic field. Dirac, with Werner Heisenberg , John Archibald Wheeler , Richard Feynman, and Freeman Dyson ultimately developed this concept into an invaluable tool for modern physics, used in the calculation of the properties of any physical system and

24180-450: Was to design the production nuclear reactors that would convert uranium into weapons grade plutonium. At the time, reactors existed only on paper, and no reactor had yet gone critical . In July 1942, Wigner chose a conservative 100 MW design, with a graphite neutron moderator and water cooling. Wigner was present at a converted rackets court under the stands at the University of Chicago 's abandoned Stagg Field on December 2, 1942, when

24336-545: Was unusual at a time when secondary education in Britain was still dedicated largely to the classics, and something for which Dirac would later express his gratitude. Dirac studied electrical engineering on a City of Bristol University Scholarship at the University of Bristol's engineering faculty, which was co-located with the Merchant Venturers' Technical College. Shortly before he completed his degree in 1921, he sat for

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