General History of Physics: 1927, Wigner and the Conservation of Parity

I'm reading Asimov's book of essays, The Left Hand of the Electron, which is why all of a sudden I've dropped into history of physics discoveries (and not nuclear physics at this point). Essay - "The Problem of Left and Right"

In 1927, the Hungarian physicist Eugene P. Wigner showed that conservation of parity is equivalent to right-left symmetry. (This is in regards to the Conservation Laws).

From Wikipedia:
Eugene Paul "E. P." Wigner (Hungarian Wigner Jenő Pál; November 17, 1902 – January 1, 1995) was a Hungarian American physicist and mathematician.

He received a share of 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"; the other half of the award was shared between Maria Goeppert-Mayer and J. Hans D. Jensen. Wigner is important for having laid the foundation for the theory of symmetries in quantum mechanics as well as for his research into the structure of the atomic nucleus, and for his several mathematical theorems.

Law of Conservation of Parity
In physics, a parity transformation (also called parity inversion) is the flip in the sign of one spatial coordinate. In three dimensions, it is also commonly described by the simultaneous flip in the sign of all three spatial coordinates:
(Wikipedia's article explains it thoroughly, with all sorts of symbols. Our goal here is not to explain how such discoveries work, but merely to note their history.)

Asimov explains the issue very simply: "This means that for parity to be conserved there must be no reason to prefer the right direction to the left or vice versa in considering the laws of nature. If one billiard ball hits another to the right of center and bounces off to the right, it will bounce off to the left in just the same way if it hits the other ball to the left of center."