Eugene Wigner

When it comes to biology, living things, they behave in ways that physics and chemistry simply don't seem to – they're not able to address.

I mean, the great physicists of the 20th century, Erwin Schrödinger and – Niels Bohr, Eugene Wigner.

Basically, if I were to paraphrase what they had to say about life, it was that biology makes no sense to a physicist.

And now that was a century ago, and you'd think, well, we've moved on from there, and there have been, in fact, developments.

It led to me co-founding a cancer early detection startup a year and a half ago.

I wrote a paper with Cy Gart and Stu Kaufman a year ago, and it was a springboard off of, this is Eugene Wigner, and he wrote a paper in 1960 called The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.

And in this paper, It's almost a meditation on how beautiful and incredible it is that in physics everything obeys mathematics.

and that there are discoveries that were made in mathematics 150 years ago, somebody with nothing but a piece of paper, and suddenly that exact same thing appears in particle physics, and it works perfectly.

And I want to explain the rationale behind this paper because I think this reveals a bottleneck that's been going on in science for about 100 years.

So in life, in the world, I see three very different levels of causation that exist.

The first level is physical chemical laws, and those are the things that Eugene Wigner was talking about in his paper.

Gravitation and electromagnetics and waves and all the things in physics that very often exact equation, exact answer exist.

The question of whether quantum mechanics has implications for your own consciousness, observation, the nature of reality is a legitimate open question in philosophy of physics, maybe not settled science.

physicists, including Eugene Wigner, John Wheeler, Roger Penrose have all treated it as a live question.

I mean, the confident dismissal of the question is a cultural choice.

It is not a scientific conclusion.

Although those people who thought about it were geniuses.

So it was Eugene Wigner and, uh, von Neumann, two giants.

Yeah.

Uh, let's first defend their reasoning.

Wait, if the math doesn't mandate a cut anywhere in the physical chain, where does it stop?

This led the Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner to propose a deeply controversial solution in 1961.

He published an essay arguing that the physical chain of atoms remains in a probability state until it encounters something entirely non-physical.

Non-physical?

Yes.

The chain terminates at human consciousness.

Wigner argued that the non-physical mind of the observer is the only thing capable of forcing the universe to choose a definitive state.

I can imagine how well bringing the non-physical mind into a physics department went over.

I'm looking for the law of the stars." All of science, I remind them, depends upon the mystical intuition that reality is marked by intelligibility.

I think I've told you before about, uh, the great physicist Eugene Wigner, who writes this article in 1960 called The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Physical Sciences.

What struck Wigner, who was a secular Jew, by the way, not a religious man, what struck him was how weird, that we need the most abstract, complex mathematics to describe the qualities of physical reality.

Why should that be true? That there's such a rich intelligibility patterning within physical things.

I just want to say it right.

In August of 1939, Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner drafted a letter warning of extremely powerful bombs of a new type by the Germans.

A letter that was signed by what theoretical physicist before being delivered to President Roosevelt?

I think that was Albert Einstein.