Eugene P Wigner - Collected Quotes

"The regularities in the phenomena which physical science endeavors to uncover are called the laws of nature. The name is actually very appropriate. Just as legal laws regulate actions and behavior under certain conditions but do not try to regulate all action and behavior, the laws of physics also determine the behavior of its objects of interest only under certain well-defined conditions but leave much freedom otherwise." (Eugene P Wigner, "Events, Laws of Nature, and Invariance principles", [Nobel lecture] 1914)

"The simplicities of natural laws arise through the complexities of the languages we use for their expression." (Eugene P Wigner, 1959)

"Nothing in our experience suggests the introduction of [complex numbers]. Indeed, if a mathematician is asked to justify his interest in complex numbers, he will point, with some indignation, to the many beautiful theorems in the theory of equations, of power series, and of analytic functions in general, which owe their origin to the introduction of complex numbers. The mathematician is not willing to give up his interest in these most beautiful accomplishments of his genius." (Eugene P Wigner, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences", Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics 13 (1), 1960)

"Somebody once said that philosophy is the misuse a terminology which was invented just for this purpose. In the same vein, I would say that mathematics is the science of skillful operations with concepts and rules invented just for this purpose."  (Eugene Wigner, "The of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences," Communications on Pure Applied Mathematics 13 (2), 1960)

"The enormous usefulness of mathematics in natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious, and there is no rational explanation for it. It is not at all natural that ‘laws of nature’ exist, much less that man is able to discover them. 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. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning." (Eugene P Wigner, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences," 1960)

"The mathematical formulation of the physicist’s often crude experience leads in an uncanny number of cases to an amazingly accurate description of a large class of phenomena. This shows that the mathematical language has more to commend it than being the only language which we can speak; it shows that it is, in a very real sense, the correct language." (Eugene P Wigner, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences", Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics 13 (1), 1960)

"[…] mathematics is the science of skillful operations with concepts and rules invented just for this purpose." (Eugene P Wigner, 'The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences," 1960)

"The mathematician is not willing to give up his interest in these most beautiful accomplishments of his genius." (Eugene P Wigner, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences", Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics 13 (1), 1960)

"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 P Wigner, "Events, Laws of Nature, and Invariance Principles", [Nobel Lecture], 1963)

"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 P Wigner, "Events, Laws of Nature, and Invariance Principles", [Nobel Lecture], 1963)

"We know many laws of nature and we hope and expect to discover more. Nobody can foresee the next such law that will be discovered. Nevertheless, there is a structure in laws of nature which we call the laws of invariance. This structure is so far-reaching in some cases that laws of nature were guessed on the basis of the postulate that they fit into the invariance structure." (Eugene P Wigner, "The Role of Invariance Principles in Natural Philosophy", 1963)

“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 P Wigner, “The Case for Astronomy”, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society Vol. 8 (1), 1964)

"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 P Wigner, "Symmetries and Reflections: Scientific Essays", 1967)

"I believe that the present laws of physics are at least incomplete without a translation into terms of mental phenomena." (Eugene P Wigner, "Physics and the Explanation of Life", 1970)

"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 P Wigner, [interview by István Kardos] 1978)

"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 P Wigner, "Symmetries and Reflections", 1979)

"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 P 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 P 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 P Wigner)