Wigner's Anecdotes

In 1963 I was asked by the Italian Physical Society to act as Scientific Secretary to a Varenna summer School (Symmetries etc.) of which Wigner was the Director. He was an excellent Director, both careful and open minded so that all went on very smoothly to full and complete satisfaction of both students and organizers.

A few chats with Eugene and events left a mark in me. Here are some of my recollections.

During one of his classes, an aggressive young physicist who later became a very well known high energy physicist (still quite active) but who at the time was rather unknown and had indeed been sent to replace somebody else (if my recollection is correct), made a statement to the effect that SOandSO had recently proved that it was not necessary to invoke Time Reversal to relate a reaction such as

to its reversed

Wigner jumped up his chair and asked, very politely if he had understood correctly and repeated the previous statement. The young physicist, somewhat embarassed, looking intently at his (pretty long) shoes repeated very coldly that this had been proved by SOandSO and proceeded to give the proper reference of the recently published paper. Wigner didn't insist but, at the end of the lecture, got up, runned the usual question time and, when this was over he proceeded to tell the audience that, concerning the statement made earlier by the young man, he mantained he had some reservations about it and recommended everyone to read the paper by J. Wheeler, Physical Review 1936 number such and page such .... Then he paused, he turned to the young lecturer and added adamantly "but, of course, at that time you were not supposed to read Physical Review...".

I had been told by friends that Wigner had been approached by a student in great disarray for his personality problems due, he believed, to his "inferiority complex". According to my reports, Eugene was very touched and invited the student to his office to discuss this matter with him. He then proceeded to pose questions and ask various details so as to have a complete panorama. The report went on to say that after a long interview, Eugene started to reassure the young man saying "Well, look, I would say you have really nothing to worry. You have no inferiority complex, you ARE inferior...". While driving Eugene to the airport, I asked him if this anecdote was actually true. He thought it over a few seconds then told me "Well, those were not EXACTLY the words...". As he himself admitted, he was an extremely polide and kind human being but he had a very sharp tongue.

The last night before the end of the School, everybody had been drafted to work on Wigner's notes to be printed and reproduced. Those were the days when the formulae had to be added by hand and everybody (including Wigner's wife) was busy hunting for misprints and scribbling the formulae in the text. But Wigner had been quite explicit that he wanted his notes to be distributed before the end of the school so everybody (his wife included) had been recruited for the occurrence. Wigner, on the other hand, was proofchecking what the others had been (and still were) doing. As somebody might recall, he used to boast that he had never published a line wrong because "he was personally proofreading and checking everything he was publishing". At a certain point, we heard a sort of painful groan coming from the corner where he was sitting: "Oooh ..." he said "Oooh Mary!... you ..., you ..., you did it ALMOST beautifully!...". As it turned out, Msr. Wigner had totally mixed up her pages writing the formulae in the wrong places and the entire set of pages had to be retyped. Truth to be said, the nice lady was quite unmoved by her husband's sort of implicit complaint.