Oral-memoir/autobiography of Hungarian physicist-chemist Eugene Wigner. Wigner is not a name even people interested in the Cold War or the nuclear bomb will be all that familiar with (except it might ring a bell as Wigner's friend or his famous essay "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences"), but turns out to almost be a Zelig or Forrest Gump: he was one of the 'Martians', who went to school with von Neumann himself and worked with him on a number of things, was a lifelong close friend of Szilard, spent years in Göttingen with the famed German physics community which was creating quantum mechanics (experiencing a good deal of pushback in getting them to use group theory, an area of mathematics absolutely integral to modern physics now), got to America well before WWII, provided the Chianti wine drunk at Fermi's splitting the atom, was a major mover in getting Einstein to write the letter that led to the Manhattan Project, and played his own role in designing nuclear reactors and producing plutonium - all this before winning a Nobel prize. Wigner protests repeatedly in the book that he is uninterested in fame or credit, and while one might think that the lady doth protest too much, one has to admit that for someone who was involved in so much and was a Nobelist, his name is known far below that of other Nobelists at the time like Feynman.

This genuine inconspicuousness carries over to the rest of the book: he seems so humble and sober that I was surprised to see that he was such an ultra-hawk that his main regret about the atomic bomb was that he had not been able to get it created even earlier so it could be used against Germany, and how he sees Hitlers & Stalins around every corner (one cannot doubt that if Wigner had not died in 1995, he would surely describe Putin and Donald Trump as future Stalins/Hitlers, and would be upset about anyone asking for his fingerprints). Wigner is more concerned with describing the great men he worked with like von Neumann or Einstein or Teller or Szilard and often defending them against criticism. (This does not always work; he has difficulty describing what he liked about Szilard in more than the extremely vague description of him being interesting, and is much more specific about Szilard's failings, so one is likely to come away with a worse impression of Szilard than one came in with, and the defenses of Teller are equally unconvincing.) This is the source of several interesting descriptions of von Neumann by one of his fellow Hungarians who knew him best. (Quotes from this memoir on Steve Hsu's blog about von Neumann were what convinced me to give the memoir a read.)

The descriptions of Hungary and Germany pre-WWII are also of interest as they offer another demonstration of what I've noted in my reviews of Mathematical People and COPSS: WWII represented a paradigm shift in science & technology, in which the tiny English/French/German European monastic world of academia (young Wigner tells his father he wants to be a physicist; how many jobs are there for physicists in Hungary?, he asks; 4, Wigner says, lying - it's actually 3) is shattered, all of the great minds exiled to the USA or USSR, the global tongue switched to English, positions growing exponentially as universities pop up like mushrooms with exploding student body counts, and giant troughs of military money funneling compromising cash into coffers, scientists now a critical weapon in fighting the Cold War and a path to power & plenitude for the pushy & pleonexic. Some of the observations are interesting: for all that Jews have a 'culture of learning', it's difficult how to see this explaining Wigner or von Neumann, neither of whom were religious Jews and Wigner so ignorant of whether his father was Jewish he spends several paragraphs speculating on the matter; Wigner notes that in the 1920s, Germany was seen as a safe-haven for Jews against the actual and potential Communist revolutions in Eastern Europe like the first brief Communist dictatorship over Hungary; that English physicists were looked down upon and papers written in English second-class before WWII; that while American high schools prepared high-caliber students poorly compared to the Hungarian high schools he went to, the American population was so large he still encountered many more prodigies in America (often a theme of European expatriate memoirs: educating their American replacements).

Some of the expression is stiff (I can't forget how he expresses horror at the 1960s, noting that "Most young people in the United States seemed deeply restless. Many of them were ingesting powerful hallucinogens. Much of daily conversation was political, and people of all ages seemed highly agitated." Martians indeed), but there are memorable parts:

This memoir omits most of the details of my personal life: just how I became fond of my wife or quarreled with my sisters. These are the things of diaries, a form that seems to me far inferior to the memoir. Diaries seem too often to only trace the patterns of the diarist's unhappiness.

...Once I asked my father, "Why are people so attached to money?" He responded simply, "Because of the power and influence it gives them." I disliked this bit of cynicism and told him so. It was years before I saw that he was largely right: The human desires for power and influence are very deep and strong. I learned a great deal from my father which I failed to fully credit at the time. These talks with my father led me to wonder, "Why am I on this earth? What do I want to achieve?" I felt my purpose should be to marry, to begin my own family, and to provide this family with a proper home and nourishment. Today, these things come far more easily and many youths no longer know what to strive for. Many of them see power and influence as the only valid goal. But in 1919, providing a home and nourishment was a valid purpose.

...Both his knowledge and his desire to relate it seemed inexhaustible. Most people walk straight home, already thinking of what they will do when they arrive. Not Jancsi [John von Neumann]. One got home late after a walk with him.

I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Max Planck, Max von Laue, and Werner Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother-in-law; Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends; and Albert Einstein was a good friend, too. And I have known many of the brightest younger scientists. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Jancsi von Neumann. I have often remarked this in the presence of those men, and no one ever disputed me.

You saw immediately the quickness and power of von Neumann's mind. He understood mathematical problems not only in their initial aspect, but in their full complexity. Swiftly, effortlessly, he delved deeply into the details of the most complex scientific problem. He retained it all. His mind seemed a perfect instrument, with gears machined to mesh accurately to one thousandth of an inch.

Despite his singular achievements in mathematics, Jancsi was raised to be well rounded. He knew English almost as well as Hungarian, perhaps from a tutor engaged at home. Eventually, he also spoke fluent German, French, and Italian.

But Jancsi's intelligence never appalled me. He was clearly better in mathematics than I was. But so were many others; I was not a mathematics prodigy. And I knew more physics than he did. I did not compete with von Neumann for prizes, scholarships, or positions. If we tried, in a friendly way, to persuade each other of certain things, that is not competition.

...Jancsi von Neumann and I had written three papers together in 1928 and two more in 1929. What a pleasure it was to work with von Neumann. I might be in Göttingen and he in Berlin. It did not matter. Each of us worked effectively alone. If I found a snag, I presented it to Jancsi. There was never a snag that he could not untangle. He explained the most complex mathematical questions in a light, casual tone. If I told him I failed to understand Warring's Law, he might smile and ask: "Do you know Hilbert's Third Proposition?" "No," I would say. "Then, do you know D' Alembert's Theorem?" he would continue, quite easily. "Yes, I think so." After three or four more questions, he would finally begin to explain Warring's Law, referring only to the theories that I knew and avoiding the others. By such circuitous paths, he quickly reached the core of the matter, which he explained easily. Von Neumann had the gift of making even the most complex concepts seem simple. Jancsi von Neumann taught me more mathematics than any other of my teachers, even Ratz of the Lutheran gimnäzium.

...Pernicious anemia was then not considered curable. So Hilbert suddenly seemed quite old. He was only about 65, which seems rather young to me now. But life no longer much interested him. I knew very well that old age comes eventually to everyone who survives his stay on this earth. For some people, it is a time of ripe reflection, and I had often envied old men their position. But Hilbert had aged with awful speed, and the prematurity of his decline took the glow from it. His breadth of interest was nearly gone and with it the engaging manner that had earned him so many disciples. Hilbert eventually got medical treatment for his anemia and managed to live until 1943. But he was hardly a scientist after 1925, and certainly not a Hilbert. I once explained some new theorem to him. As soon as he saw that its use was limited, he said, "Ah, then one doesn't really have to learn this one." It was painfully clear that he did not want to learn it.

..I had come to Göttingen to be Hilbert's assistant, but he wanted no assistance. We can all get old by ourselves.

...One day, I was lying on the grass near the Göttingen municipal swimming pool. Beside me sat the German astronomer Heckman. Suddenly, Heckman saw a lot of red ants crawling on one of my legs. He was surprised that I permitted this and asked did they not bite? When I answered that yes they did bite, Heckman asked why I did not kill them. "Well," I said, "I can't tell which ones are doing the biting."

...When I first entered physics in 1921, people used to smile when I said I was a physicist. They saw my profession as the harmless pursuit of complex irrelevancies. Now they had stopped smiling. I had some pride, and I liked that. But I was one of many scientists who also looked back fondly to the days when science had been a monastic calling. One scientist wrote a song that expressed our feeling well: "Take Back Your Billion Dollars" ["Take Away Your Billion Dollars", Arthur Roberts]. All of this money had brought bureaucracy and taken some of the pleasure from the practice of science. Modern physics was also disturbingly specialized. Specialization is productive; I clean the house much less well than my wife, so she cleans the house while I practice science. Scientists who specialize can pay closer attention to their work and better master it.

But it is sad to lose touch with whole branches of physics, to see scientists cut off from each other. Dispersion theorists do not know axiomatic field theory; cosmologists do not know nuclear physics. Quantum mechanics is hard to explain to a chemist; its terms and concepts are highly developed. And yet the best theoretical chemists really ought to know quantum mechanics.

Specialization of science also robbed us of much of our passion. We wanted to grasp science whole, but by then the whole was something far too vast and complex to master. Only rarely could we ask the deep questions that had first drawn us to science.

In 1870, the year my father was born, a first-rate physicist could expect to master every branch and aspect of physics. There was a great ignorance surrounding many basic physical elements, but there was also a freedom and graciousness that allowed physicists to range freely over the field. Even as a young man in the 1920s, I had expected in my heart to one day know all of physics. I was ashamed then that I hardly knew planetary theory or electromagnetic theory. I said, "Well, I will begin to remedy the situation just as soon as I finish writing this article. . ." Perhaps the expectation of learning all of physics was just an illusion, but it was a beautiful illusion, and near enough to the truth to be credible.

One day around 1942 I told James Franck, "I don't think I will give much to physics after the war." Physics is a young man's game; I was then 40 years old and beginning to feel like an old fogey. Franck disagreed with me, but only because he felt that physics would evolve slowly after the war. But the growth of physics never slowed - it sped up. And that changed physics, not only in practice, but emotionally as well.

By 1950, even a conscientious physicist had trouble following more than one sixth of all the work in the field. Physics had become a discipline, practiced within narrow constraints. I tried to study other disciplines. I read Reviews Of Modern Physics to keep abreast of fields like radio-astronomy, earth magnetism theory, and magneto-hydrodynamics. I even tried to write articles about them for general readers. But a growing number of the published papers in physics I could not follow, and I realized that fact with some bitterness.

Ultimately, it is a good but not great autobiography of a fairly interesting life of a minor figure of the Cold War; if one is not already familiar with and interested with figures like Feynman and von Neumann, there are probably more rewarding books for one to read.