During World War II he was evacuated to England via a British submarine, due to his father being a leader of the Norwegian resistance movement.
In 1972, Wiik returned to Germany, to the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg where, four years later, he was appointed lead scientist.
In 1978, Wiik and his collaborators began using DESY's newly commissioned PETRA electron–positron storage ring to look for hard-gluon bremsstrahlung events that would provide experimental support for the existence and role of gluons in mediating strong interactions among quarks.
Wiik was also responsible for proposing and overseeing the implementation of a superconducting linear accelerator for Tera-electronvolt energies, TESLA.
[7] He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1989 "for his contributions to the realization of the large electron-proton colliding beam facility, HERA, at the Deutsches Electron Synschotron Laboratory in Hamburg, West Germany" [8] Wiik died on 26 February 1999 in Appel at the age of 62 due to "an accident at home".