Dear Colleagues,As we look forward to the Science & Ultimate Reality meeting in Princeton in
honor of John Archibald Wheeler, March 15-18, 2002, I shall be circulating
to the registrants summaries of the papers to be presented. You are
cordially invited to submit comments and suggestions in response to this
material. We hope that in this manner we shall be able to stimulate some
lively exchanges, so that the participants will better be able to engage
topics of interest at the symposium.
I shall endeavour to facilitate the discussion, which may also involve
contributions from colleagues not participating in the symposium. Please
send any material offered for circulation to me.
You can reply to this message or send a new message for distribution on
the conference list to <wheeler@listserv.metanexus.net> or write me off-list
at <pcwd@ozemail.com.au>. This is a moderated email distribution list, so
all messages will be approved by me to restrict the quantity and maintain
the quality of the discussion. Please feel free to forward these messages
to friends, colleagues, and students. For more information about the event
and project, please go to <http://www.metanexus.net/ultimate_reality>. To
subscribe, unsubscribe, or access the online archives, please go to:<http://listserv.metanexus.net/metanexus/archives/wheeler.html>.
To begin this project, I have pleasure in presenting a short essay by
Kenneth Ford that charts John Wheeler's illustrious career. Ken has had a
long scientific career himself, as a nuclear and particle physicist, and
later as a science writer too. He is well known for co-authoring Wheeler's
autobiography, published by Norton in 1988 under the title 'Geons, Black
Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics.'
Sincerely,
Paul Davies
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John Archibald Wheeler
Doer and Visionary
by Kenneth Ford
One thing that has amazed John Wheeler's students and colleagues alike over
the more than 65 years that he has been practicing physics is his
versatility-not just in the kinds of physics that he does, but in the way
that he does physics. He has often "turned the crank," churning through
detailed, complex calculations; and just as often, he has stepped back from
this machinery of the theoretical physicist to contemplate, wonder about,
and ask the most probing questions about the machinery of the whole
universe. The same John Wheeler who calculated how an excited uranium
nucleus wiggles its way toward fission has also dared to ask "How come
existence?" To Wheeler, the fissioning nucleus and the nature of existence
are parts of the same fabric of physics.
John Archibald Wheeler likes to use the full name that captures his American
lineage-many generations of Archibalds on his mother's side and many
generations of Wheelers on his father's side. He was born in Jacksonville,
Florida in 1911 and grew up in Glendale, California, Youngstown, Ohio,
Benson, Vermont, and Baltimore, Maryland. Thanks to a teacher in Vermont who
moved him through three grades in one year (in a one-room schoolhouse), he
entered the Johns Hopkins University early and earned his Ph.D. there before
reaching his 22nd birthday. He says it was the combined engineering-physics
library at Hopkins that undid his original intent to become an engineer.
When he went to the library to study engineering materials, he found himself
captivated by Zeitschrift für Physik.
From the moment he chose physics as a career, Wheeler looked always for what
was most fundamental, what was on the frontier. In 1933, just a year after
the neutron and positron were discovered, what lay on the frontier were
nuclear physics and the quantum physics of electrons, positrons, and
photons-called pair theory at the time. These subjects and their offshoots,
electrodynamics, muons, and weak interactions, occupied Wheeler for nearly
twenty years. In that period, besides inventing the S matrix, being the
first to study nuclear rotation (with Edward Teller), calculating the
scattering of light by light with Gregory Breit (a phenomenon observed sixty
years later), and providing a theory of nuclear fission with Niels Bohr, he
worked with Richard Feynman on the "action-at-a-distance" formulation of
electrodynamics, conceived of positrons as electrons moving backward in
time, calculated the properties of "bi-electrons" (positronium) and
"tri-electrons" (discovered decades later), and, with Jayme Tiomno,
postulated a universal Fermi interaction.
During World War II, Wheeler was a key figure in the Manhattan Project,
active in the design and operation of the plutonium-producing reactors at
Hanford, Washington. In 1950 he went back to weapons work, helping to design
the first hydrogen bomb. Yet throughout his work on fission and fusion
weapons, he always found time for his "Princeton physics."
Wheeler likes to say that his career has moved through three phases, from
"Everything is particles" to "Everything is fields" to "Everything is
information."
Particles gave way to fields when Wheeler became captivated by general
relativity and gravitation, beginning with his offering of Princeton's
first-ever course on relativity in 1952-53. In the years that followed, it
is scarcely an exaggeration to say that he single-handedly changed
Einstein's general theory of relativity from the playground for
mathematicians that it had become to the vital field of physics-both
theoretical and observational-that it is today. He was hardly into the field
before he was probing its limits, the limit of small size and quantum
fluctuations that led to his concept of "quantum foam" and the limit of
intense gravity that led him to the idea of a "geon" and into the study of
gravitational collapse and eventually his coinage of the term "black hole."
He says that he "fought against" the black hole as long as he could, until
his last defense was breached and he had to conclude that it was more than
likely real, and so deserved a name. For the reality of black holes, there
is now abundant evidence. Quantum foam and geons remain to be found. So do
Wheeler's "wormholes," although they have made their appearance in popular
fiction (Michael Crichton's Timeline).
In his "Fields Period," Wheeler imagined a beginning and end of time, saying
"There was no 'before' before the Big Bang?" and "There will be no 'after'
after the Big Crunch?" (When he said that, the Big Crunch seemed a more
likely eventual fate of the universe than it does today.) He took seriously
and extended Mach's principle, the idea that the distribution of mass and
energy in the universe is the seat of inertia. And he explored the idea of
"mutability," that the laws of physics themselves can change, that perhaps
the laws we have came about "by chance" at the time of the Big Bang in the
same way that life on Earth arose "by chance."
Enter the "Information Period." Wheeler, in his later years, has been asking
two kinds of questions. One centers around the reality of existence "out
there" independent of our observations. In Wheeler's hands, this is a
physics question, not a philosophical question. The concept of a
"participatory universe," in which we shape events by observing them, is
subject to experimental test. To bring home the point, he devised the
"delayed choice" experiment, which has indeed been carried out in the
laboratory and can be imagined over billions of light years.
The other kind of question concerns the nature of physical law. "It from
bit?" is Wheeler's way of asking if the nature and the behavior of the world
around us ("it") is accounted for entirely by on-off gates of information
("bits"). Is the computer a better model for nature than the differential
equations of continuous variables that has governed physics for several
hundred years? Wheeler has no specific theory of "it from bit." It is a
vision. He calls it "an idea for an idea," one that he hopes will inspire
the productive work of others in the twenty-first century.
As Wheeler has moved from particles to fields to information, he has
increasingly emphasized the mystery of quantum physics. "How come the
quantum?" he likes to ask. Recently he wrote, "Relativity is exciting almost
beyond measure, yet there is nothing so mysterious about it. Quantum
mechanics is a different story-an incredibly successful theory that has
steered much of twentieth-century science yet remains, at its core, entirely
mysterious." He goes on, "Throughout my career, I have tried to look beyond
the immediacies of this or that calculation to ask how it all hangs
together. In my vision of the world there is a reason, a simple reason, not
only for every individual phenomenon, but for every general theory. This
magnificent edifice of quantum mechanics is sitting there with, so far, no
clear reason for its being. I may not live to see that reason unearthed," he
adds, "but I try, in my small way, to encourage the young to pursue that
vision and find the reason. It could make the twenty-first century as
dramatically exciting for physicists as the twentieth has been."
"Science & Ultimate Reality"
A program to honor John Archibald Wheeler
John Wheeler celebrated his 90th birthday in July 2001. Recognizing that
event, and in honor of Wheeler's impact on physics and the way we look at
the world, The John Templeton Foundation, joined by the Peter Gruber
Foundation Cosmology Prize, decided to initiate a special "Science &
Ultimate Reality" program, with three components. First a symposium, to be
held in Princeton, New Jersey March 15-18, 2002, will bring leading
scientists and thinkers together to discuss topics in four broad areas: (I)
Quantum Reality - Theory, (II) Quantum Reality - Experiment, (III) Big
Questions in Cosmology, and (IV) Emergence, Life, and Related Topics. It is
expected that much of the discussion will relate to the "really big
questions" that John Wheeler has asked.
Second, and in conjunction with the symposium, there will be a Young
Researchers Competition. Scientists under age 32 from around the world have
submitted applications setting forth their research that bears on the
subject matter of the symposium and the legacy of John Wheeler's work. A
panel of screeners is choosing fifteen of these to be invited to the March
symposium, where they will deliver short talks. A panel of judges will award
prizes based on all the evidence of these young researchers'
accomplishments: seven prizes of $5,000 each and one prize of $10,000.
Third, a book with commissioned chapters by thirty leading physicists and
scholars will be published in 2003, covering the same range of topics as the
symposium and intended to have a long "shelf life" as inspiration and guide
to scientists pursuing fundamental questions in the years ahead. To
stimulate interest and discussion prior to the symposium, Paul Davies is
hosting an electronic forum that will include summaries submitted by the
chapter writers, introductory and bridging commentary by Davies, and
back-and-forth comments by participants in this forum. Paul Davies, who will
also write the summary and overview chapter for the book, is eminently
qualified for this role as electronic forum host. He is known both for his
research in cosmology, gravitation, black holes, and quantum fields, and for
his numerous books, including The Physics of Time Asymmetry, Quantum Fields
in Curved Space (with N.D. Birrell), The Ghost in the Atom (with J.R.
Brown), The Mind of God, About Time and, most recently, How to Build a Time
Machine.
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This email list is part of the Science & Ultimate Reality Symposium in honor
of John Archibald Wheeler, March 15-18, 2002 in Princeton, N.J. For more
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