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Born #onthisday in 1902, Eugene Wigner 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 the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles".

One of my favorite Wigner things: his essay titled "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences" [1].

Wigner also formulated the famous paradox in quantum mechantics known as "Wigner's friend" [4]. Wigner's friend is a thought experiment first published by Wigner in 1961 and further developed by David Deutsch in 1985. The scenario involves an indirect observation of a quantum measurement: An observer W observes another observer F who performs a quantum measurement on a physical system. The two observers then formulate a statement about the physical system's state after the measurement according to the laws of quantum theory. In the Copenhagen interpretation, the resulting statements of the two observers contradict each other. In some sense the observer F becomes entangled with the measurement so that W cannot know the outcome without another measurement (even though F knows the outcome).

#math #maths #mathematics #unreasonableeffectiveness #physics #naturalsciences #wignersfriend #measurementproblem

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