Nobelmen & Nobelwoman

Princeton's courtly Physicist Eugene P. Wigner, though his name is not a household word, ranks high among the pioneers who led a nervous world into the age of the atom. In 1939, he was one of the five farsighted scientists* who wrote a letter for Albert Einstein to send to President Franklin D. Roosevelt suggesting that "it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power would be generated." He was present at the University of Chicago's secrecy-shrouded squash court under the Stagg Field stands when the first nuclear reactor went critical on Dec. 2, 1942. He was responsible for the design of the great plutonium reactors at Hanford, Wash.

Endless honors have already testified to the scientific achievement of those hectic days, and modest Dr. Wigner has received a valuable share--the Enrico Fermi Award ($50,000), half of the Atoms for Peace award ($75,000). Last week he got his highest accolade: half of the Nobel Prize in physics ($51,158).

For a man whose tireless activities range through varied fields, from scientific administration to advising the Government, the prize was presumably recognition of a lifetime of accomplishment. But Nobel committees tend to focus on the specific, and Wigner was cited for early theoretical work on the structure of the atomic nucleus and his early recognition of the shattering implications of quantum mechanics.

Valuable Band. The award was also a reminder of the brilliant and valuable band of scientific immigrants/- who fled Central Europe to escape Hitlerism. Wigner came to the U.S. from Germany in 1930. That same year, Mrs. Maria Goeppert Mayer, who shared the other half of the physics prize with Professor J. Hans D. Jensen of Heidelberg, came to the U.S. from Germany.

The only woman besides Marie Curie to win (1903) a Nobel physics prize, Mrs. Mayer was honored for research showing that atomic nuclei are built of onionlike layers of neutrons and protons held together by complicated forces. This concept, paralleling work by Professor Jensen, replaced the idea that the nucleus resembles a liquid drop, and it explained many nuclear properties.

Chemical Trickery. This year's Nobel Prize in chemistry was split between Director Karl Ziegler of the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research in Muelheim, West Germany, and Professor Giulio Natta of the Polytechnic Institute of Milan, Italy. Both men were among the first to recognize the potentialities of macromolecules--the aggregations of thousands of atoms that play an ever-increasing part in modern chemical industry. Some macromolecules, such as the cellulose molecules in cotton or wood, are formed by nature. Others must be formed by chemical trickery. Drs. Ziegler and Natta developed practical methods by which molecules of simple substances can be linked together in large but orderly chains or networks, producing the plastics and synthetic fibers that have become so prominent in everyday life.

* The others: Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Victor F. Weisskopf and Enrico Fermi.

/- Others were Mathematician John von Neumann, Physicist Hans Bethe, Aerodynamicist Theodore von Karman.

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