Eugene Paul Wigner's Nobel Prize
Y.S. Kim

TL;DR
This paper reviews the historical development and significance of Eugene Wigner's 1939 Lorentz group paper, highlighting its impact on understanding particle symmetries and internal space-time structures in physics.
Contribution
It demonstrates how Wigner's little groups for massive and massless particles can be unified into a Lorentz-covariant framework, clarifying their physical implications.
Findings
Wigner's little groups explain electron spin and other particle spins.
A Lorentz-covariant formula unifies symmetries of massive and massless particles.
The gap between mathematical groups and physical electromagnetic waves was resolved by 1990.
Abstract
In 1963, Eugene Paul Wigner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles. There are no disputes about this statement. On the other hand, there still is a question of why the statement did not mention Wigner's 1939 paper on the Lorentz group, which was regarded by Wigner and many others as his most important contribution in physics. By many physicists, this paper was regarded as a mathematical exposition having nothing to do with physics. However, it has been more than one half century since 1963, and it is of interest to see what progress has been made toward understanding physical implications of this paper and its historical role in physics. Wigner in his 1963 paper defined the subgroups of the Lorentz group whose…
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Taxonomy
TopicsParticle physics theoretical and experimental studies · Noncommutative and Quantum Gravity Theories · Relativity and Gravitational Theory
