Working With Wigner's Papers
The Collected Works Of Eugene Paul Wigner Eugene Paul Wigner is a nine-volume set that gathers his published research, correspondence, and some unpublished notes. It was compiled after his death and published by Princeton University Press between 1993 and 1998. If you are tracking down specific papers or trying to understand the editorial decisions behind the compilation, there are a few things worth knowing that you will not find in a standard bibliographic entry. The volumes are organized chronologically rather than thematically, which makes sense for a collected works but creates friction when you are looking for everything Wigner wrote on a particular topic. Volume 1 covers 1931 to 1937, when he was still largely focused on quantum mechanics and nuclear theory. Volume 5 picks up around 1948 and runs through 1955, which is where his work on symmetry principles and group theory really takes off. Volume 9 is mostly correspondence and some shorter miscellaneous pieces. One thing most people miss: the collected works include reprints of papers that originally appeared in obscure journals or conference proceedings from the 1930s and 40s. Some of these original publications are hard to locate on their own. The collected edition fixes that. But the pagination within each volume follows the original publication, not a sequential numbering system. If you cite something from volume 4, you need to reference both the collected volume number and the original page range, or anyone checking your work will struggle to find the passage.
A Practical Problem I Hit
I was cross-referencing Wigner's 1934 paper on neutron scattering with later commentary in the collected works, and I ran into a discrepancy. The original paper listed the title as "Zur Theorie der Neutronenstreuung," but in the collected edition, the title was anglicized to "On the Theory of Neutron Scattering." The content was the same, but if you are building a bibliography or tracking citation chains across languages, this kind of title shift can make it look like two different papers. I ended up maintaining a separate spreadsheet that mapped each collected works entry to its original publication details, including language, journal, and any title changes. It took about three hours to set up, but it saved me weeks of chasing down what I thought were duplicate references. Each volume opens with a brief editorial introduction that notes which papers were included, which were omitted, and why certain pieces were rearranged. The introductions are by Jen Wigner, his widow, who handled much of the selection process. She was not a physicist, which means some of the technical decisions about what counts as a "publication" versus personal correspondence are left to editorial judgment. A few letters between Wigner and von Neumann ended up in volume 7, while other letters of similar length were excluded. There is no consistent rule stated in the editor's notes. The bibliographic entries at the back of each volume are useful but not comprehensive. They list every item in that volume with publication details, but they do not serve as a master index across all nine volumes. If you need to find everything Wigner wrote between 1940 and 1950, you have to check volumes 3 through 6 manually. There is no cumulative index.
Where the Collection Falls Short
The most significant gap is the absence of lecture notes and some of his informal teaching materials. Wigner gave numerous lectures at Princeton and elsewhere that were never formally published but influenced how generations of physicists approached symmetry in quantum mechanics. These materials exist in university archives, not in the collected works. If your research depends on understanding how his ideas evolved in a pedagogical context, you will need to go to the Princeton University archive or the Institute for Advanced Study library. The collected works will not cover that ground. Another limitation: the collected works do not include Wigner's full correspondence with anyone except a selected subset. Some of his letters to Oppenheimer, Feynman, and others are omitted entirely. If you are studying the social or intellectual networks behind mid-century physics, you will find the correspondence sections frustratingly incomplete. I spent several months looking for a letter Wigner wrote to Heisenberg in 1933 that I knew existed from secondary sources, and it simply was not in the collection. It turned out to be held at the Niels Bohr Library in Copenhagen.
Get the Full Details
Access Options
The Princeton University Press hardcover set runs about $400 for the full nine-volume collection if you order directly. Used copies surface occasionally on AbeBooks and eBay, usually in the $150 to $250 range depending on condition. Many university libraries with physics or history of science collections carry the set. If you are not near one, interlibrary loan is an option, though it can take three to four weeks for the full set since most libraries treat it as a single request. There is no official digital edition. Some individual papers from the collected works have been scanned and appear on JSTOR or in digitized backfiles of the original journals, but the collected works as a complete package have not been converted to a searchable electronic format. This means you cannot run full-text searches across all nine volumes at once. If that capability matters for your research, your best bet is to scan the relevant volumes yourself using OCR software. A modern scanner with Tesseract or ABBYY FineReader will produce decent results on the typeset pages, though the handwriting in the correspondence sections will need manual review.
What to Expect From the Writing Style
Wigner's papers are dense but exceptionally clear for someone working in mathematical physics. He did not bury his arguments in notation the way some of his contemporaries did. Reading a Wigner paper from the 1930s feels more like reading a proof in a logic textbook than a physics journal article from the same period. That clarity is one reason his work remains cited decades later, especially in areas like representation theory and the mathematics of conservation laws. The correspondence sections are a different experience. They read like notes from a colleague who happened to be one of the most important physicists of the twentieth century. The tone is dry, the humor is understated, and the technical content often gets buried under logistical complaints about conference travel and manuscript reviews. If you are looking for deep theoretical insights in the letters, you will need to read carefully. Most of the substantive physics appears in the papers, not the correspondence.
Using the Collection for Citation
If you are citing from the collected works rather than the original publication, the standard format is to reference the volume number and the page range within that volume, followed by the original publication details in a note. Many journals accept this, but some prefer the original citation with the collected works mentioned as a secondary source. Check with your target publication before committing to one approach or the other. I usually recommend citing the original whenever possible. The collected works are a convenience, not a substitute for the primary source. The original journal gives you the full context of peer review, corrections, and any errata that may have been issued. The collected edition smooths over some of that history. A few typographical errors from the originals were carried forward into the collected works without correction, which is something to keep in mind if you are doing close textual analysis.
