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Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics

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Having noticed over the years that Prof. John Archibald Wheeler's name turns up in an amazing variety of physics-related articles and anecdotes, I was particularly primed to read his autobiography. The book doesn't follow a simple from-birth chronology, but rather begins with Wheeler teaching at Princeton and volunteering to meet the ship carrying his mentor, Niels Bohr, at a New York City dock in January of 1939. From that pivotal moment at the brink of World War II, Wheeler fills out his story by reaching back to childhood and forward to his long career in teaching, research, and national service. We learn of his brother Joe, whose body lay in a foxhole on an Italian hillside until it was reduced to bones. Wheeler reminds us that if the Manhattan Project had geared up one year earlier, the lives of his brother and many others might have been spared.

Wheeler's remarkable character pervades the book and helps make it unique and interesting. In a profession legendary for strong intellects and egos, he has achieved and maintained a pomposity coefficient of zero. His judgments of other people are unfailingly generous, but also astute enough to be interesting and revealing. He provides candid firsthand impressions of legendary figures such as Bohr, Einstein, Oppenheimer, Teller, Ulam, Heisenberg, Fermi, Szilard and Feynman . We also learn about many less well-known colleagues, friends and students whom he finds memorable for various reasons. In contrast to the eminent-scientist stereotype, Wheeler has always enjoyed teaching undergraduates and is genuinely interested in the problems and aspirations of the young people entrusted to his care.

Like the brilliant George Gamow, Wheeler has a talent for explaining difficult concepts and illustrating them with whimsically inventive diagrams. The book's autobiographical threads are interwoven with a rich tapestry of subtle but plainly-spoken physical insights on dozens of topics, some arcane enough to leave even the author slightly bemused. I believe anyone interested in physics will find a personal revelation or two among Wheeler's lucid, informal scientific explanations. There are touches of Gamowesque humor too, such as his theory that the fates somehow conspired to entangle him with a string of Hungarian emigres.

The title concepts of the book -- Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam -- were all named by Wheeler himself. He began his career at the minute scale of particle physics, moved on to the grand sweep of relativistic cosmology, and finally circled back to the hyperminuteness of quantum foam. Of course there is nothing really disjointed about such a journey, since connections among the nested scales of nature constitute one of the grand unifying themes of physics.

Physicists often compare themselves to blind men feeling an elephant -- each guessing at the nature of the beast by describing the small part that they can touch. If true, then no man has come closer to feeling the Whole Elephant than John Archibald Wheeler. Wheeler's energetic career touched virtually every significant modern physicist -- Bohr, Fermi, Einstein, Teller, Oppenheimer, Feynman and many others -- a dazzling list that includes the most luminous minds of the last century. Wheeler may have missed winning a Nobel prize only because he was willing to sacrifice the best slice of his career to secretly help develop the fission and later fusion bombs for America. After leaving what he calls the "everything is particles" phase of his career, Wheeler entered "everything is fields" -- inventing the term "black hole" and describing the properties of these amazing objects long before anybody else ever took them seriously. Some ideas such as "geons" -- self sustained loops of light held together by their own gravitational attraction -- may still await discovery. Finally, in "everything is information" he explores ways in which information theory may be the most underlying unifying principle of reality. Part biography, part history and part speculation, this rambling story portrays a uniquely American explorer on a voyage through the amazing landscape of 20th century physics. The book is packed with photographs and profiles of the world's smartest men, fascinating anecdotes and meticulous historical details -- and shows that even at the age of 87, John Wheeler can still get excited talking about the unsolved mysteries that pervade our universe.

--Auralgo

I had the great fortune to meet Dr. Wheeler this year, and was thus inspired to read his autobiography. I'm very glad I did so. It is well written as well as beautifully organized. For someone who can understand the most esoteric concepts of physics, it is a blessing that he can share then with us in a manner which may make them somewhat comprehendable even though most readers will not have had a physics backround. For the physicist this is a must read since Dr. Wheeler is one of the pioneers in relativity and quantum (modern) physics--not to mention he is one of the few remaining who were there with Einstein, Bohr and others. Further, for the beginning scientist, this book introduces one to the ideas in physics that will occupy the next century. He ends his book with some of the questions that physicists will face, such as why the quantum? For the non-scientists, Dr. Wheeler is a gentleman whose life is very intriguing. Some parts of the book may be a little invovled, but as one lady told me, "you can just skim those." The life of a man who lived through WWII is fascinating enough to enjoy reading. Also, his times with such famous physicsist's as Einstein, are a pleasure to read.

Some of the more interesting features of his book include his discussions on gravity, on black holes (he coined the name), how nuclear reactors work, and of the famous scientists (including Einstein, Bohr, Feynmann, etc.).

Enjoy!

During his tenure at Princeton university, John Archibald Wheeler has served as the mentor to such outstanding physicists as Richard P. Feynman, Kip Thorne and Hugh Everett. He was also great friends with such individuals as Albert Einstein & Niels Bohr. In short, his contributions to physics have been indispensable.

This present work of his traces his life, a life that is (as the cover says) one of science. However, one of the nice facets of this book is that it goes beyond just the laboratory & reveals the personal life of this great man. We learn of the moving death of his brother in WWII, his worries and concerns over nuclear war (as well as the grapples with his conscience that he endured over the invention of the hydrogen bomb) and many other aspects of his life. He also tells stories of some of his most memorable students; not all of these were necessarily his most gifted pupils. Above all, Wheeler reveals a genuine human passion that has characterized his approach to science over the greater part of this century. One of the best biographies of a scientist I have ever read.

J.A. Wheeler should be considered as a symbol of the really fantastic development of (primarily, theoretical) physics in this century. He was closely acquainted with practically all key figures, the founding fathers of quantum theory and the both relativities; moreover, he is the spiritual father of many other great physicists (R.P. Feynman to be named as the most outstanding of them). Wheeler's brilliant scientific achievements in quantum theory, nuclear physics and general relativity are widely known. Now we have his autobiography written in collaboration with his former student, K. Ford. This book in fact is a treatise on history of modern physics, many intimate details of the latter being outlined in it with captivating simplicity and - at the same time - full scientific rigour. This is a real treasure for every physicist, especially a lecturing one, as well as for students in physics and its history. Such an encounter with our contemporary colleague teaches and instructs us in our science, its laws of development, as well as it gives a new and profound aspiration to everybody to critically look into his/her proper behaviour in science and its vicinities. Let God and the Authors forgive me a bit of critics, but I have to mention an error in p. 143 in a caption under drawings by G. Gamow: the first of them is not of Niels Bohr, but of Paul Ehrenfest (acting as Faust), see G. Gamow, Thirty Years That Shook Physics, Dover, 1966, pp. 177-178. Some further nontrivial biographic information about J.A. Wheeler can be found in J. Bernstein, Quantum Profiles, Princeton Univ. Press, 1991.

This is really a wonderful scientific biography. Wheeler has an engaging, easy-going style that doesn't sacrifice detail and scholarly accuracy for readibility. It's almost like having a fireside chat with the great physicist about the entire history of 20th century physics. Wheeler's career spanned almost the entire 20th century and he worked in many areas, from atomic and radiation physics to nuclear physics, quantum theory, black holes and gravitation. He even made a brief foray into sociology when he attended a conference and spoke on "National Survival and Human Development," in which he emphasized the importance of a country developing the full capabilities of all citizens.

In addition to learning about his own distinguished career, you meet just about every other important physicist and/or mathematician or had anything to do with physics (such as Carson Mark, who I didn't know about before, who Wheeler spoke highly of), and his account is full of interesting personal details about famous and non-famous physicists alike. Wheeler met or knew other great scientists like Einstein, Niels Bohr, Richard Feynman, Hans Bethe, Oppenheimer, Stanislaw Ulam, John von Neumann, Enrico Fermi, Ernest Lawrence, Isidore Rabi, Leo Szilard, Carl Bohm, and many others too numerous to mention.

In addition to the above famous names, I also learned something about many other names, both famous and not so famous, that I didn't know much about before, and Wheeler often briefly mentions what each scientist's contribution was about, especially when it influenced his own thinking.

Wheeler provides some important insights about himself. For example, he commented on how much of his own productivity was due to the deadlines and time pressure he was under most of his career. Many of us have the impression that brilliant minds like Wheeler (much of it fostered by the public's stereotype of Einstein) create their amazing intellectual achievements in a world divorced from reality and the mundane aspects of everyday life, but Wheeler says that it was often all the deadlines he had to meet that was responsible for much of his best work. He was always having to meet deadlines for papers, class lectures, various reports, talks he was invited to give, and so on throughout the course of his career, and he said he was often spurred to work harder because of them, and often did his best work under the pressure of having to prepare a lecture or talk at the last minute.

Overall, this is a very enjoyable, readable, and interesting biography about one of the great scientists of our time.

By the way, just a personal note here. I'm not a physicist myself (actually, I'm a neurobiologist by training), but I'm the grand-nephew of physicist Ernest Lawrence, who won the 1939 Nobel prize for his invention of the first atom smasher or cyclotron, and who Wheeler met briefly when he was considering a move from Princeton to U.C. Berkeley.

This book is a kind of autobiography concentrating in the scientific career of J.A. Wheeler. Wheeler has devoted his scientific life to Quantum Theory,General Relativity (he has a very famous co-authored monograph, Gravitation) and has tried to bridge the gap between these two key physics theories, specially studying black holes, term that he coined.

He also devised the delayed choice experiment that is a refinement of the double slit experiment and shows how quirky is Quantum Mechanics, i.e. Nature, at its fundamental level. In his last years he has also reflected on the big "philosophical" questions:How come existence? How come the quantum? He has ventured that information is the fundamental ingredient of everything: It from bit (or rather It from qubit).

The book starts with the very interesting history of the Manhattan project, although perhaps it is the last chapter that I most enjoyed. Wheeler is a great teacher and he can explain difficult matters in a very clear way. This last chapter deals with time. He sets a sci-fi scenario (fiction only from a technical point of view) in which people travel at near light speed. Of course, when they come back to Earth, parents are younger than children that stayed at home and all the clocks have different hours. Can you image what would the chaos be in a society like ours where universal time is so important in our daily lives? For Wheeler, time is an emergent property, such as temperature or entropy.

Another thing he explains well is the reality of virtual particles. Without them we could not reconcile the predicted and the observed value of the electron's magnetic moment. The book is only outdated in his belief in the Big Crunch.

Wheeler was a student of Bohr and has had a lot of famous students, most notably Dick Feynman.

This highly readable book is a history of XXth century physics full of anecdotes, such as the French not liking the name meson which would be pronounced like "maison" (house)in French.

After having studied many of Wheeler's physics books and papers, nuclear physics notwithstanding, it was very interesting to finally read about the man. I was amazed by number of top physicists with whom Wheeler rubbed elbows. If Wheeler was not at the frontier of developing physics, himself, he was in the middle a community of physicsts who were pioneering various areas of physics and Wheeler was, in many cases, socially involved with those physicists. The anecdotes were fantastic. My favorite had to have been the anecdote he presents where he was trying to get in touch with Godel to discuss the rotating cosmology ideas that Godel invented.

This book falls short in, really, in one area alone, namely, that the book is not as captivating as I would have hoped. Wheeler's writing is a bit dry, but this is expected from all but the absolutely rare physicists who are, more or less, polymathic.

One thing that makes this book very enjoyable is the collection of photos that Wheeler has implemented. I found myself spellbound by a few of them.

As biographies go this is a good read. The physics, though superficial, is quite informative. I do wish Dr. Wheeler had delved deeper into the concept of quantum foam and quantum gravity. Wheeler's discourse on who, when, and "how" the 'super' was developed is very good. The fact that Ulam first came up with the radiation method of igniting the 'super' was news to me!! Good read. Well worth the price...

I learned a lot from this important book, even though I am a chemical engineer. Especially insightful is the chapter "It from Bit", where the famous two-slit experiment is well explained and where its meaning and implications are brought home in a powerful (and to me new) way. The author(s) say(s) that history is very important, and Wheeler shows both an interest and a passion for history. As we become more mature, we all tend to agree on this. So the only annoying thing about this remarkable book is its treatment of Austrians. (I have no Austrian blood that I know of...) Saying that both Mach and Schroedinger are Germans (p. 92 and p. 323) is probably an offense to these scientists, but also a disregard for simple and well known facts; one then cannot help but wonder whether some of the more important and difficult facts are right in this book.