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Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics
He studied with Niels Bohr, taught Richard Feynman, and boned up on relativity with his friend and colleague Albert Einstein. John Archibald Wheeler's fascinating life brings us face to face with the central characters and discoveries of modern physics. He was the first American to learn of the discovery of nuclear fission, later coined the term "black hole," led a renaissance in gravitation physics, and helped to build Princeton University into a mecca for physicists.
From nuclear physics, to quantum theory, to relativity and gravitation, Wheeler's work has set the trajectory of research for half a century. His career has brought him into contact with the most brilliant minds of his field; Fermi, Bethe, Rabi, Teller, Oppenheimer, and Wigner are among those he called colleagues and friends. In this rich autobiography, Wheeler reveals in fascinating detail the excitement of each discovery, the character of each colleague, and the underlying passion for knowledge that drives him still.
From nuclear physics, to quantum theory, to relativity and gravitation, Wheeler's work has set the trajectory of research for half a century. His career has brought him into contact with the most brilliant minds of his field; Fermi, Bethe, Rabi, Teller, Oppenheimer, and Wigner are among those he called colleagues and friends. In this rich autobiography, Wheeler reveals in fascinating detail the excitement of each discovery, the character of each colleague, and the underlying passion for knowledge that drives him still.
380 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews
October 27, 2019
Insanely quotable. Contains lovely ideas that make one stop, think, 'stand and stare'.
But, DNF so far. I still might click with this one at a later date.
Q:
Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve. (c)
Q:
The electron pays for its freedom to move forward and backward in time by remembering neither future nor past. We remember the past and are trapped in one-way motion through time. (c)
Q:
Entropy is nothing more than the grand totality of lost information. (c)
Q:
... the act of turning potentiality into actuality, is an act of choice. (c)
But, DNF so far. I still might click with this one at a later date.
Q:
Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve. (c)
Q:
The electron pays for its freedom to move forward and backward in time by remembering neither future nor past. We remember the past and are trapped in one-way motion through time. (c)
Q:
Entropy is nothing more than the grand totality of lost information. (c)
Q:
... the act of turning potentiality into actuality, is an act of choice. (c)
April 17, 2019
just about a perfect scientific autobiography
February 4, 2023
4.5 stars
Just a wonderful autobiography and great writing from a man who worked at the forefront of astrophysics, the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb programs. He popularized the term black hole and coined the terms wormhole and blackhole without hair. He was a professor for fifty years mostly at Princeton and won numerous awards in Physics except the Nobel Prize. The stories are priceless.
He seemingly knew everyone in nuclear physics and astrophysics. He studied under Bohr, consulted regularly with Einstein both of whom he admired immensely. He worked with all of the notable physicists in the Manhattan project. He mentored Bekenstein, Thorne themselves giants in the field of Astrophysics and hundreds of other physicists over the years. Later in life he also became friends with Fang Lizhi who was a Chinese physicist and dissident. Lizhi and his wife had to remain inside the American Embassy for a year and a half after Lizhi criticized the Chinese government's crackdown at Tiananmen Square crackdown and then came after him. The dissidents came to America and settled in Tucson.
The book is full of insightful vignettes like these. In 1952 Wheeler was traveling from New Jersey back to D.C. for sn important meeting on the H-Bomb program. On the train ride he lost a top secret paper where he outlined the importance of securing lithium-6 supplies for the Hydrogen bomb development as it was a vital element in the Deuterium-Tritium method of fission and was needed for optimal implosion of a thermonuclear device. Wheeler suspects it was stolen by Russian spies on the train. When he told the Pentagon when he arrived that he lost the paper they disconnected the train car and searched it throughly to no avail. He was reprimanded by President Eisenhower but not punished.
Enjoyed this book immensely. Highly recommended for science fans or history buffs.
Just a wonderful autobiography and great writing from a man who worked at the forefront of astrophysics, the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb programs. He popularized the term black hole and coined the terms wormhole and blackhole without hair. He was a professor for fifty years mostly at Princeton and won numerous awards in Physics except the Nobel Prize. The stories are priceless.
He seemingly knew everyone in nuclear physics and astrophysics. He studied under Bohr, consulted regularly with Einstein both of whom he admired immensely. He worked with all of the notable physicists in the Manhattan project. He mentored Bekenstein, Thorne themselves giants in the field of Astrophysics and hundreds of other physicists over the years. Later in life he also became friends with Fang Lizhi who was a Chinese physicist and dissident. Lizhi and his wife had to remain inside the American Embassy for a year and a half after Lizhi criticized the Chinese government's crackdown at Tiananmen Square crackdown and then came after him. The dissidents came to America and settled in Tucson.
The book is full of insightful vignettes like these. In 1952 Wheeler was traveling from New Jersey back to D.C. for sn important meeting on the H-Bomb program. On the train ride he lost a top secret paper where he outlined the importance of securing lithium-6 supplies for the Hydrogen bomb development as it was a vital element in the Deuterium-Tritium method of fission and was needed for optimal implosion of a thermonuclear device. Wheeler suspects it was stolen by Russian spies on the train. When he told the Pentagon when he arrived that he lost the paper they disconnected the train car and searched it throughly to no avail. He was reprimanded by President Eisenhower but not punished.
Enjoyed this book immensely. Highly recommended for science fans or history buffs.
August 27, 2015
An interesting romp through the physics of the 20th Century. John Wheeler was involved with many of the ideas and, it seems, almost all of the major figures who turned our traditional view of the world upside down. If one looked solely at the physics parts of his memoir, you'd walk away happy with a lay understanding of some very exciting work. The book is worth the read just for this tour de force through non-classical physics.
I felt that the book could have undergone another round of editing. The narrative jumps back and forth through time. That could be okay if he focused on one topic and went through all the times it cropped up, then set the clock back to discuss another topic. He's in and out, more like one would get if you were at a cocktail party and kept picking up the conversation with him as you rotated throughout the various guests. Exciting conversation, yes, but hard to keep up at times.
While this isn't a comment on the book, but more the man, I found myself repeatedly "yelling" at the book about his politics. It seems he was an adherent of the "my country, right or wrong, my country" philosophy. I didn't see any introspection about his nuclear weapons work both during World War II and his work on the much more devastating hydrogen bomb during peacetime. I saw much more reflection from Oppenheimer, Einstein and Bethe. I think he missed President Eisenhower's speech on the rise of the military-industrial complex.
Wheeler never explores the impact of his weapons work on others. He ignores the rest of the world, focusing solely on Europe, when he sees vindication of his weapon's work by the fact that Europe had peace for the longest period ever after the end of World War II. He neglects to mention the proxy wars fought between the East and the West in Africa (e.g. Congo, Angola), Latin America (e.g. Guatemala, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua), the Middle East (e.g. Lebanon, Iran), and Asia (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Korea).
Intersecting both the man and the memoir, I felt there was a huge lack of humility on his part. He doesn't need to beat himself up or constantly downplay his achievements, which are plenty. But I felt as if physics in the 20th century would never have happened if Mr. Wheeler hadn't been around. I guffawed (a word I've always wanted to use!) when he called out several scientists (including Oppenheimer) for being less than humble.
Having ranted for several paragraphs, I want to conclude by saying that this is a book worth reading for many people. To see how science was done is crucial for today and tomorrow. Scientists worked together, and PhD's taught their students, instead of passing such duties on to their graduate assistants. Also, it stirred so much up in me, part excitement, part questioning, part disagreement, that it must be a good book since it got a conversation going in my head and with the person who gave me the book.
I felt that the book could have undergone another round of editing. The narrative jumps back and forth through time. That could be okay if he focused on one topic and went through all the times it cropped up, then set the clock back to discuss another topic. He's in and out, more like one would get if you were at a cocktail party and kept picking up the conversation with him as you rotated throughout the various guests. Exciting conversation, yes, but hard to keep up at times.
While this isn't a comment on the book, but more the man, I found myself repeatedly "yelling" at the book about his politics. It seems he was an adherent of the "my country, right or wrong, my country" philosophy. I didn't see any introspection about his nuclear weapons work both during World War II and his work on the much more devastating hydrogen bomb during peacetime. I saw much more reflection from Oppenheimer, Einstein and Bethe. I think he missed President Eisenhower's speech on the rise of the military-industrial complex.
Wheeler never explores the impact of his weapons work on others. He ignores the rest of the world, focusing solely on Europe, when he sees vindication of his weapon's work by the fact that Europe had peace for the longest period ever after the end of World War II. He neglects to mention the proxy wars fought between the East and the West in Africa (e.g. Congo, Angola), Latin America (e.g. Guatemala, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua), the Middle East (e.g. Lebanon, Iran), and Asia (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Korea).
Intersecting both the man and the memoir, I felt there was a huge lack of humility on his part. He doesn't need to beat himself up or constantly downplay his achievements, which are plenty. But I felt as if physics in the 20th century would never have happened if Mr. Wheeler hadn't been around. I guffawed (a word I've always wanted to use!) when he called out several scientists (including Oppenheimer) for being less than humble.
Having ranted for several paragraphs, I want to conclude by saying that this is a book worth reading for many people. To see how science was done is crucial for today and tomorrow. Scientists worked together, and PhD's taught their students, instead of passing such duties on to their graduate assistants. Also, it stirred so much up in me, part excitement, part questioning, part disagreement, that it must be a good book since it got a conversation going in my head and with the person who gave me the book.
February 16, 2014
I knew John Wheeler as most senior coauthor of the 1200-page book Gravitation, and this is his autobiography. Yes, Wheeler has done research on General Relativity, coining the terms "black hole" and "wormhole". The geons of the title are electromagnetic waves so massive they are held together by their own gravity; by Wheeler's calculations, a torus the size of the Sun and a million times more massive is the smallest one for which quantum effects could be ignored; he also explored geons composed of gravitational waves. However, Wheeler has done much more than that. He worked on the Manhattan Project, living next to the world's first large-scale nuclear reactor, the B Reactor at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. When the reactor suddenly stopped working, Wheeler thought that some fission product must be absorbing a lot of neutrons; by looking at the way the reactor was restarted, he realized that the half-life of the fission product must be less than 11 hours, but not much less; looking at the chart of isotopes, he guessed that it was xenon-135; indeed, it was. They added more fuel elements, since the designer of the reactor anticipated this possibility. Wheeler wonders whether, had the atomic bomb project started a year sooner and ended a year sooner, World War II would have lasted a year less; I very much doubt it. Before the war, Wheeler worked with Niels Bohr on nuclear physics, predicting correctly that isotope 239 of element 94 would be fissionable by slow neutrons. In his later years he tried to start a program to reorganize physics around the concept of information: each pencil lead is unique, but each carbon-12 atom is identical; the thing that makes an individual pencil lead from individuality-less atoms is information. I couldn't find any other physicist who took up this program. Much of the rest of the book is reminiscences about other physicists Wheeler has interacted with, from Albert Einstein to David Deutsch.
April 19, 2009
John Wheeler was my great uncle.
The book mixes auto-biography and a layman's guide to modern (late 20th century) astrophysics
The book mixes auto-biography and a layman's guide to modern (late 20th century) astrophysics
June 22, 2020
I remember getting so excited to find this one new in the bookstore with my family when it just came out.
March 12, 2011
Favorite quotes:
"The universe is a grand synthesis, putting itself together all the time as a whole....It is not one thing happening after another....It is a totality in which what happens 'now' gives reality to what happened 'then,' perhaps even determines what happened then....Measuring, the act of turning potentiality into actuality, is an act of choice." (p. 338, 339) I'm still pondering that one.
"The electron pays for its freedom to move forward and backward in time by remembering neither future nor past. We remember the past and are trapped in one-way motion through time." (p. 348)
"Entropy is nothing more than the grand totality of lost information." (p. 341)
"The universe is a grand synthesis, putting itself together all the time as a whole....It is not one thing happening after another....It is a totality in which what happens 'now' gives reality to what happened 'then,' perhaps even determines what happened then....Measuring, the act of turning potentiality into actuality, is an act of choice." (p. 338, 339) I'm still pondering that one.
"The electron pays for its freedom to move forward and backward in time by remembering neither future nor past. We remember the past and are trapped in one-way motion through time." (p. 348)
"Entropy is nothing more than the grand totality of lost information." (p. 341)
September 12, 2010
If you're looking for a great biography of a physicist central to many of the major discussions and discoveries of the twentieth century, this is perfect. John Archibald Wheeler came up with the name "black hole," fitting pioneering work on relativisitic astronomy into a busy schedule of shaping the then-emerging field of quantum mechanics from both scientific and philosophical angles.
June 18, 2024
LIFE EVENTS AND OPINIONS OF THE PHYSICIST ON MANY SUBJECTS
John Archibald Wheeler (1911-2008) was an American theoretical physicist who taught at Princeton University (1938-1976), and was director of the Center for Theoretical Physics at the University of Texas at Austin (1976-1986). He wrote in the first chapter of this 1998 book, “I am convinced that the United States, with the help of its British and Canadian allies, could have had an atomic bomb sooner and ended the war sooner---perhaps a year sooner than the summer of 1945---if scientific and political leaders had committed themselves to the task earlier… an atomic bomb program started a year earlier and concluded a year sooner would have spared 15 million lives, my brother Joe’s among them.” (Pg. 19)
Of Einstein’s famous letter to Roosevelt recommending work on an atomic bomb, he comments, “The central element of Einstein’s letter was a plea for government liaison with the scientists working on uranium. Very soon---thanks in great part to the effectiveness of [Alexander] Sachs as the messenger---such a liaison was established. Yet the sense of alarm and urgency that permeated Einstein’s letter took a long time to take root in the government.” (Pg. 33-34)
He outlines, “I think of my lifetime in physics as divided into three periods. In the first period, extending from the beginning of my career until the early 1950s, I was in the grip of the idea that ‘Everything Is Particles.’ I was looking for ways to build all basic entities… out of the lightest, most fundamental particles, electrons and photons… I call my second period ‘Everything Is Fields.’ … I pursued the vision of a world made of fields, one in which the apparent particles are really manifestations of electric and magnetic fields, gravitational fields, and spacetime itself… Now I am in the grip of a new vision, ‘Everything Is Information.’ The more I have pondered the mystery of … our strange ability to comprehend this world in which we live, the more I see possible fundamental roles for logic and information as the bedrock of physical theory.” (Pg. 63-64)
He observes, “I like to say, when asked why I pursue science, that it is to satisfy my curiosity, that I am by nature a searcher, trying to understand. Now, in my eighties, I am still searching. Yet I know that the pursuit of science is more than the pursuit of understanding. It is driven by the creative urge, the urge to construct a vision, a map, a picture of the world that gives the world a little more beauty and coherence than it had before. Somewhere in the child that urge is born.” (Pg. 83-84)
He recounts, “Under [Niels] Bohr’s leadership, the ‘Copenhagen interpretation’ of the new quantum mechanics was hammered out in the late 1920s. It was that interpretation that Bohr defended in his famous on-again, off-again debates with Einstein. It is that interpretation that has withstood every onslaught since, but which is still debated---and is still a source of uneasiness for many physicists, myself included. Some are uneasy because the Copenhagen interpretation sweeps away certainty at the core of physics, replacing it with uncertainty. That’s what Einstein couldn’t accept. I am uneasy for a different reason. I see no bedrock of logic on which quantum mechanics is founded. ‘What is the underlying REASON for quantum mechanics?’ I keep asking myself. It has to flow from something else, and that something else remains to be found.” (Pg. 123-124)
He recalls, “Bohr’s institute has been called the Vatican of physics. To be sure, it drew pilgrims from every land. And, to be sure, Bohr presided as a benevolent, fatherly figure… Here was an institute free of hierarchy, free of pomp, nearly free of ceremony… People came to Copenhagen not just to interact with Bohr, but to form and renew friendships and professional bonds with fellow physicists from everywhere. To me, the best metaphor for Copenhagen is family. That is where I joined the international family of physics.” (Pg. 142-143)
He explains, “No one in the twentieth century believed that one body could act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else. Well, almost nobody. I saw chinks in the armor of field theory, and thought that it was time for a new look at action at a distance. I wanted to explore the idea that one charged particle could act upon a distant charged particle without an intermediate field… Was I just swimming upstream to be different? I didn’t think so, because electromagnetic field theory does contain some notable internal difficulties… I had another motivation… for I clung to my hope that all of the matter in the world could be reduced to electrons and positrons… Perhaps, I thought, an action-at-a-distance version of electromagnetic theory---one without fields---might explain the suppression of such radiation and permit the particles to live happily in such a confined space.” (Pg. 164-165)
He points out, “time-reversal invariance is not an absolute law. For most processes in nature, any sequence of events that can occur in one order can occur in exactly the opposite order---that is what we call ‘time-reversal invariance.’ But for certain processes… the principle breaks down. A quite amazing consequence of this breakdown… is that out of the chaos of the early universe emerged a world containing more particles than antiparticles. As cosmologists like to put it, if fitch and Cronin had not found what they found, we would not be here.” (Pg. 177-178)
He comments, “Insights have a way of surfacing at different places at the same time. When that happens, it is usually because ideas bounce around the globe, triggering the same thoughts in different places.” (Pg. 187)
He explains, “Lines of field can SEEM to disappear at one place and SEEM to appear at another place without ever ending or beginning… The theory admits the possibility that field lines disappear from view… and that somewhere else---and it could be trillions of miles distant---those field lines emerge from what looks like a positive electric charge. I later gave this handle the name ‘wormhole.’ It is the path through which field lines can sneak from one place to another in multiply connected space. The size of the mouth of the wormhole could be imagined to be arbitrarily small, so that the mouth could approximate… a point particle. What a vision swam across my view! A space riddled with billions upon billions of wormholes, their myriad mouths indistinguishable from electrically charged particles… Beautiful or not, the wormhole theory of charge has difficulties. It suggests a perfect balance in nature between positive and negative particles of each type. Yet we see in our universe more electrons than positrons, and more protons than antiprotons. And what of the stability of wormholes?... the diameter of a wormhole can shrink so fast that not even a photon can shoot through from one of the mouths to the other before it pinches off. Yet… in some circumstances, the very existence of the lines of field plunging through the wormhole can prevent the collapse. So the wormhole as a theoretical entity and the visions it conjures up remain very much alive.” (Pg. 240-241)
He continues, “‘Whatever can be, must be.’ This article of faith---and it is only faith---makes me want to believe that nature finds a way to exploit every feature of every valid theory. Every faith, including this one, must have some boundaries. The boundary of this one is supplied by the finiteness of the universe. There is a finite number of particles in the universe, a finite amount of mass, a finite duration of it all---the universe began and will likely end. Therefore, not every one of the infinite number of predictions that any theory can make can be realized. Yet I cling to the faith that every general feature will be realized. If relativity is correct, and if it allows for wormholes, then somehow, somewhere, wormholes must exist---or so I want to believe.” (Pg. 241)
He acknowledges, “A difficulty with this ‘Copenhagen interpretation’… that still deeply troubles me and many others, is that it splits the world in two… [Hugh] Everett… sought to get around these troubling questions by describing a totally quantum world in which there was… only quantum systems at all levels of size and complexity… Bryce DeWitt … chose to call the Everett interpretation the ‘many worlds; interpretation… Although I have coined catchy phrases myself to try to make an idea memorable, in this case … ‘Many worlds’ and ‘parallel universes’ were more than I could swallow.” (Pg. 269-270)
He summarizes, “Now, in my older years, as the time ahead shortens and my brain chugs along more slowly, I try to focus on the deepest questions… I ask myself: How come the quantum? How come the universe? How come existence? With luck, perhaps, I will contribute a little to the answers to these questions in what remains of my life. Not all of my colleagues consider these questions quite respectable. But if they are not respectable in the twentieth century, they will be in the twenty-first. They are questions that should be engaging the next generation of physicists. They… should fall… within physics and will be answered as matters of science, not of philosophy or theology—or speculation.” (Pg. 287)
He adds, “In these later years, I have dared to think about and write about and ask about the physical world in terms that some of my colleagues consider outside the scope of science… as it is now accepted, defined, and practiced. Is the universe a self-excited circuit, made real by observations?... Do the laws of physics some into existence in… the Big Bang, and are they extinguished in the big Crunch? Is time a secondary, derived concept?... I do not apologize for questions like these and hope that they are not the result merely of a weakening brain… I hope that I have earned the right to speculate on the future shape of the subject to which I have devoted my life.” (Pg. 354-355)
This book will be “must reading” for anyone studying Wheeler, or for anyone wanting to know more of the life and opinions by a creative figure in contemporary physics.
John Archibald Wheeler (1911-2008) was an American theoretical physicist who taught at Princeton University (1938-1976), and was director of the Center for Theoretical Physics at the University of Texas at Austin (1976-1986). He wrote in the first chapter of this 1998 book, “I am convinced that the United States, with the help of its British and Canadian allies, could have had an atomic bomb sooner and ended the war sooner---perhaps a year sooner than the summer of 1945---if scientific and political leaders had committed themselves to the task earlier… an atomic bomb program started a year earlier and concluded a year sooner would have spared 15 million lives, my brother Joe’s among them.” (Pg. 19)
Of Einstein’s famous letter to Roosevelt recommending work on an atomic bomb, he comments, “The central element of Einstein’s letter was a plea for government liaison with the scientists working on uranium. Very soon---thanks in great part to the effectiveness of [Alexander] Sachs as the messenger---such a liaison was established. Yet the sense of alarm and urgency that permeated Einstein’s letter took a long time to take root in the government.” (Pg. 33-34)
He outlines, “I think of my lifetime in physics as divided into three periods. In the first period, extending from the beginning of my career until the early 1950s, I was in the grip of the idea that ‘Everything Is Particles.’ I was looking for ways to build all basic entities… out of the lightest, most fundamental particles, electrons and photons… I call my second period ‘Everything Is Fields.’ … I pursued the vision of a world made of fields, one in which the apparent particles are really manifestations of electric and magnetic fields, gravitational fields, and spacetime itself… Now I am in the grip of a new vision, ‘Everything Is Information.’ The more I have pondered the mystery of … our strange ability to comprehend this world in which we live, the more I see possible fundamental roles for logic and information as the bedrock of physical theory.” (Pg. 63-64)
He observes, “I like to say, when asked why I pursue science, that it is to satisfy my curiosity, that I am by nature a searcher, trying to understand. Now, in my eighties, I am still searching. Yet I know that the pursuit of science is more than the pursuit of understanding. It is driven by the creative urge, the urge to construct a vision, a map, a picture of the world that gives the world a little more beauty and coherence than it had before. Somewhere in the child that urge is born.” (Pg. 83-84)
He recounts, “Under [Niels] Bohr’s leadership, the ‘Copenhagen interpretation’ of the new quantum mechanics was hammered out in the late 1920s. It was that interpretation that Bohr defended in his famous on-again, off-again debates with Einstein. It is that interpretation that has withstood every onslaught since, but which is still debated---and is still a source of uneasiness for many physicists, myself included. Some are uneasy because the Copenhagen interpretation sweeps away certainty at the core of physics, replacing it with uncertainty. That’s what Einstein couldn’t accept. I am uneasy for a different reason. I see no bedrock of logic on which quantum mechanics is founded. ‘What is the underlying REASON for quantum mechanics?’ I keep asking myself. It has to flow from something else, and that something else remains to be found.” (Pg. 123-124)
He recalls, “Bohr’s institute has been called the Vatican of physics. To be sure, it drew pilgrims from every land. And, to be sure, Bohr presided as a benevolent, fatherly figure… Here was an institute free of hierarchy, free of pomp, nearly free of ceremony… People came to Copenhagen not just to interact with Bohr, but to form and renew friendships and professional bonds with fellow physicists from everywhere. To me, the best metaphor for Copenhagen is family. That is where I joined the international family of physics.” (Pg. 142-143)
He explains, “No one in the twentieth century believed that one body could act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else. Well, almost nobody. I saw chinks in the armor of field theory, and thought that it was time for a new look at action at a distance. I wanted to explore the idea that one charged particle could act upon a distant charged particle without an intermediate field… Was I just swimming upstream to be different? I didn’t think so, because electromagnetic field theory does contain some notable internal difficulties… I had another motivation… for I clung to my hope that all of the matter in the world could be reduced to electrons and positrons… Perhaps, I thought, an action-at-a-distance version of electromagnetic theory---one without fields---might explain the suppression of such radiation and permit the particles to live happily in such a confined space.” (Pg. 164-165)
He points out, “time-reversal invariance is not an absolute law. For most processes in nature, any sequence of events that can occur in one order can occur in exactly the opposite order---that is what we call ‘time-reversal invariance.’ But for certain processes… the principle breaks down. A quite amazing consequence of this breakdown… is that out of the chaos of the early universe emerged a world containing more particles than antiparticles. As cosmologists like to put it, if fitch and Cronin had not found what they found, we would not be here.” (Pg. 177-178)
He comments, “Insights have a way of surfacing at different places at the same time. When that happens, it is usually because ideas bounce around the globe, triggering the same thoughts in different places.” (Pg. 187)
He explains, “Lines of field can SEEM to disappear at one place and SEEM to appear at another place without ever ending or beginning… The theory admits the possibility that field lines disappear from view… and that somewhere else---and it could be trillions of miles distant---those field lines emerge from what looks like a positive electric charge. I later gave this handle the name ‘wormhole.’ It is the path through which field lines can sneak from one place to another in multiply connected space. The size of the mouth of the wormhole could be imagined to be arbitrarily small, so that the mouth could approximate… a point particle. What a vision swam across my view! A space riddled with billions upon billions of wormholes, their myriad mouths indistinguishable from electrically charged particles… Beautiful or not, the wormhole theory of charge has difficulties. It suggests a perfect balance in nature between positive and negative particles of each type. Yet we see in our universe more electrons than positrons, and more protons than antiprotons. And what of the stability of wormholes?... the diameter of a wormhole can shrink so fast that not even a photon can shoot through from one of the mouths to the other before it pinches off. Yet… in some circumstances, the very existence of the lines of field plunging through the wormhole can prevent the collapse. So the wormhole as a theoretical entity and the visions it conjures up remain very much alive.” (Pg. 240-241)
He continues, “‘Whatever can be, must be.’ This article of faith---and it is only faith---makes me want to believe that nature finds a way to exploit every feature of every valid theory. Every faith, including this one, must have some boundaries. The boundary of this one is supplied by the finiteness of the universe. There is a finite number of particles in the universe, a finite amount of mass, a finite duration of it all---the universe began and will likely end. Therefore, not every one of the infinite number of predictions that any theory can make can be realized. Yet I cling to the faith that every general feature will be realized. If relativity is correct, and if it allows for wormholes, then somehow, somewhere, wormholes must exist---or so I want to believe.” (Pg. 241)
He acknowledges, “A difficulty with this ‘Copenhagen interpretation’… that still deeply troubles me and many others, is that it splits the world in two… [Hugh] Everett… sought to get around these troubling questions by describing a totally quantum world in which there was… only quantum systems at all levels of size and complexity… Bryce DeWitt … chose to call the Everett interpretation the ‘many worlds; interpretation… Although I have coined catchy phrases myself to try to make an idea memorable, in this case … ‘Many worlds’ and ‘parallel universes’ were more than I could swallow.” (Pg. 269-270)
He summarizes, “Now, in my older years, as the time ahead shortens and my brain chugs along more slowly, I try to focus on the deepest questions… I ask myself: How come the quantum? How come the universe? How come existence? With luck, perhaps, I will contribute a little to the answers to these questions in what remains of my life. Not all of my colleagues consider these questions quite respectable. But if they are not respectable in the twentieth century, they will be in the twenty-first. They are questions that should be engaging the next generation of physicists. They… should fall… within physics and will be answered as matters of science, not of philosophy or theology—or speculation.” (Pg. 287)
He adds, “In these later years, I have dared to think about and write about and ask about the physical world in terms that some of my colleagues consider outside the scope of science… as it is now accepted, defined, and practiced. Is the universe a self-excited circuit, made real by observations?... Do the laws of physics some into existence in… the Big Bang, and are they extinguished in the big Crunch? Is time a secondary, derived concept?... I do not apologize for questions like these and hope that they are not the result merely of a weakening brain… I hope that I have earned the right to speculate on the future shape of the subject to which I have devoted my life.” (Pg. 354-355)
This book will be “must reading” for anyone studying Wheeler, or for anyone wanting to know more of the life and opinions by a creative figure in contemporary physics.
December 2, 2016
Overall, Wheeler's memoir isn't bad, but you will need a solid background in the history of physics to really appreciate it. His acknowledges his perspective is limited, so there's not much depth to some of the big name physicists he describes in brief encounters. He's also very biased towards himself. Although he acknowledges that his reticence to enter WW2 was great, he doesn't dwell on the fact that he didn't believe the Nazi atrocities until he saw the concentration camps in person. He tries to overcome his past by throwing himself fully into war work once he sees its importance, but he doesn't spend much time defending his decision to support Germany for as long as he did. Later in the book, one of his colleagues that he helped hire at Princeton is being investigated by the House of Un-American Activities Committee and he does nothing to support him. He justifies this by noting that his colleague had changed from what he appeared to be in the interview to who he actually was. He also notes that his colleague's defense rested not on whether he was a Communist but whether HUAC should be investigating anyone. Wheeler seems to regret this decision a bit, but definitely not to the extent you'd expect. On a positive note, Wheeler coined the term black hole, it from bit, and thought up some interesting examples of applied quantum theory. So, his memoir has lots of merit, but he is human, so you may discover some parts of his personality you do not like too.
February 5, 2015
Wheeler nasceu em 1911 e morreu em 2008. Acompanhou toda a física do século XX. Começou no estudo do núcleo, participou do Projeto Manhattan e do desenvolvimento da bomba de hidrogênio, pulou para a área de gravidade, (quase) inventou o termo "buraco negro", inventou o termo "buraco de minhoca", pulou para teoria quântica e fez mais contribuições. Orientou Feynman, Kip Thorne, Hugh Everett III e outros físicos famosos. Esbarrou em uns cinco prêmios Nobel (não levou nada no final). Provavelmente o físico mais azarado do século.
Não tem como uma autobiografia assim não ser no mínimo muito interessante (para quem gosta de ciências).
Não tem como uma autobiografia assim não ser no mínimo muito interessante (para quem gosta de ciências).
March 3, 2009
This book is like a nice tall glass of water. Cold but refreshing. A bit dull, but useful for a vigorous lifestyle. A lot of the book is rather hard to appreciate without at least oh a year of physics but there are also plenty of interesting anecdotes about the Manhattan project, the creation of the H-bomb and various academic brouhahas from someone on the inside. But it's also pretty repetitive and not engaging most of the time. If your already interested in Physics though, you'd probably enjoy working through it for a while.
April 30, 2025
¡Lo disfruté muchísimo! Mis partes menos favoritas son aquellas con tintes más autobiográficos, pero es que Wheeler estuvo en el centro de tanto tumulto y prodigio científico que resulta imposible separar su vida personal de sus contribuciones intelectuales. Creo que me gustaría volver a leerlo en un futuro, intentando saltarme las partes donde abundan explicaciones sobre fenómenos ya muy abordados o cuestiones personales. La anécdota sobre Gödel me pareció interesantísima.
December 21, 2007
John Wheeler is a genius, not only in physics, but also in writing. He manages to make esoteric concepts bearable--the only guy I know who not only excited uranium and plutonium, but also made the topic exciting on paper.
July 31, 2013
This impressive book tells readers about the fascinating life of physicist John Archibald Wheeler. Great introduction to the notion that "empty space" is really a seething "quantum foam" where particles spring into existence from nowhere.
June 26, 2008
I can't believe I didn't add this one earlier. John Wheeler is one of my favorite physicists of the"old guard". He's th e"it from bit" guy! I love that!
June 20, 2016
A very interesting and engaging autobiography by one of the smartest theoretical physicists of the twentieth-century. Highly recommended!
December 22, 2023
This is an immensely enjoyable autobiography of one the most influential physicists of the 20th century, if you are interested in the subject, that is. Wheeler spent his whole long life researching and teaching this fascinating subject, in which he introduced major innovations. But his magnum opus remains the treatise he co-authored with Charles Misner and Kip Thorne, "Gravitation", which contains everything the serious student needs to know about Einstein's General Relativity. It is divided in two "Tracks", Track one for the serious amateur(myself), and Track 2 for the real specialist. But contrary to that so-called "telephone book", which is highly technical, Geons, Black Holes & Quantum Foam is a page turner which the layman can read easily. Kenneth Ford has certainly done a great job in this respect...
However, the book contains a major omission, which I couldn't really explain. Speaking about the application of GR to cosmology, Wheeler writes(page 92): "Einstein's 1915 equations of general relativity implied that our universe is dynamic, not static, but neither Einstein nor anyone else who studied the theory was willing to accept that revolutionary concept until the evidence forced it". What he means by that is :"until Edwin Hubble discovered that remote galaxies are receding from us, in 1929. Unfortunately this is far from the truth! For two scientists "who studied the theory" discovered this prior to Hubble's publication: the Russian Alexander Friedmann, and the Belgian Georges Lemaître, the first in 1924, the second in 1927. The Russian physicist sent a note to the journal "Zeitschrift für Physik" in September 1922, in which he expounds a dynamic solution to Einstein's field equations. Einstein reads the note and thinks that Friedmann had made an error in his calculations, but he later retracted his criticism and admitted that Friedmann was right, and that he himself had made a calculation error. The same happened with Lemaître in 1927...Is it ignorance on the part of Wheeler? I don't believe it, really. There is a tendency in the US to disregard or at least minimize the achievements of European scientists. For example, the general metric of GR for a homogeneous universe is usually referred to as the Robertson-Walker metric, where in fact it should be called the Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker metric, which has been adopted lately by some authors under the acronym FLRW.
But this doesn't mean that the book is not highly recommended for anyone interested in this most fascinating subject!
However, the book contains a major omission, which I couldn't really explain. Speaking about the application of GR to cosmology, Wheeler writes(page 92): "Einstein's 1915 equations of general relativity implied that our universe is dynamic, not static, but neither Einstein nor anyone else who studied the theory was willing to accept that revolutionary concept until the evidence forced it". What he means by that is :"until Edwin Hubble discovered that remote galaxies are receding from us, in 1929. Unfortunately this is far from the truth! For two scientists "who studied the theory" discovered this prior to Hubble's publication: the Russian Alexander Friedmann, and the Belgian Georges Lemaître, the first in 1924, the second in 1927. The Russian physicist sent a note to the journal "Zeitschrift für Physik" in September 1922, in which he expounds a dynamic solution to Einstein's field equations. Einstein reads the note and thinks that Friedmann had made an error in his calculations, but he later retracted his criticism and admitted that Friedmann was right, and that he himself had made a calculation error. The same happened with Lemaître in 1927...Is it ignorance on the part of Wheeler? I don't believe it, really. There is a tendency in the US to disregard or at least minimize the achievements of European scientists. For example, the general metric of GR for a homogeneous universe is usually referred to as the Robertson-Walker metric, where in fact it should be called the Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker metric, which has been adopted lately by some authors under the acronym FLRW.
But this doesn't mean that the book is not highly recommended for anyone interested in this most fascinating subject!
May 30, 2024
Enjoyable biography of one of the giants in theoretical physics. Lots of stories about the pantheon of great physicists - Einstein, Bohr, and many others.
Some great quotes:
“One square inch of paper comfortably holds the equations of general relativity … eighty years later new insights are still flowing …”
In the early days of computing: “In those days, a standard method of checking the MANIAC’s performance was to walk around its innards, hitting the steel framework that held it its electronics with a rubber mallet, and then repeating a calculation to see if the MANIAC gave the same answer.”
“Nature abhors a singularity”
“The great lesson of quantum mechanics is that if we choose to measure one thing, we thereby prevent the measurement of something else. We can decide what we want to measure, but we can’t decide to measure all properties of system at once.”
Some great quotes:
“One square inch of paper comfortably holds the equations of general relativity … eighty years later new insights are still flowing …”
In the early days of computing: “In those days, a standard method of checking the MANIAC’s performance was to walk around its innards, hitting the steel framework that held it its electronics with a rubber mallet, and then repeating a calculation to see if the MANIAC gave the same answer.”
“Nature abhors a singularity”
“The great lesson of quantum mechanics is that if we choose to measure one thing, we thereby prevent the measurement of something else. We can decide what we want to measure, but we can’t decide to measure all properties of system at once.”
August 16, 2025
John Wheeler is a true superstar—one of the greatest scientific minds of the 20th century (and that century had no shortage of geniuses). Beyond his brilliance, he also lived a fascinating life, vividly captured in this engaging autobiography. I even found myself tearing up toward the end. There’s a moving sense of nostalgia as you realize his journey has concluded, which ties beautifully to the final chapter’s title, The End of Time.
I especially loved the “It from Bit” chapter. While I was already familiar with the idea, no one explains it with the same clarity, imagery, and simplicity as Wheeler does.
My only reason for giving it 4.5 stars instead of 5 is that certain sections—particularly those on particle physics—dragged a little for my taste. That said, I’m not usually a fan of biographies, yet I thoroughly enjoyed this one. Highly recommended.
I especially loved the “It from Bit” chapter. While I was already familiar with the idea, no one explains it with the same clarity, imagery, and simplicity as Wheeler does.
My only reason for giving it 4.5 stars instead of 5 is that certain sections—particularly those on particle physics—dragged a little for my taste. That said, I’m not usually a fan of biographies, yet I thoroughly enjoyed this one. Highly recommended.
January 3, 2025
The best book in physics, the most monumental ideas, by one of the most considerate minds in the field. Highly influential, containing some of the ideas central to the advancement of our knowledge of reality.
reshelved
July 27, 2025Not up to my level. Though: Quantum Mechanics is often described as the theory of the very small. A true statement, as far as it goes. . . . [but], the large and the small cannot be separated. Damn right! It's known as relativity!
May 1, 2019
Another excellent autobiography, highly recommended to everybody who knows who was Wheeler.
February 20, 2021
A highly informative book about the generous life of a splendidly gifted man who I had known little about. The "It from Bit" chapter is well worth the price of the book
May 14, 2023
What an amazing book. Wheeler wrote the book in the late 90s yet the last three chapters are as relevent as ever.
July 21, 2024
Starts well. Interesting his early experiences with the Manhattan project and working with Bohr, as are later sections on general relativity. But also some long, dull sections
February 27, 2016
B Wheeler - Autobiography of physicist John Archibald Wheeler from 1911-1995. Career at Princeton, UNC Chapel Hill and UT Austin. Relationship with Nils Bohr and quantum physics, and Albert Einstein and general relativity.
October 10, 2011
I read this in college. There aren't that many books I still remember. This one was good!
December 25, 2014
Autobiography of a great American physicist. All the facts and polished thoughts, but nearly enough intimacy or exploration of his vulnerabilities that one might hope for.
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