Related papers: John Archibald Wheeler: A Biographical Memoir
During the period identified as the Rebirth of General Relativity, John Wheeler was instrumental in retrieving the physics of gravity that had become hidden behind the mathematical formalism. For Wheeler himself the change in point of view…
Recollections by the author about how his interactions with John Wheeler influenced his career in physics.
During the conference on the methods of differential geometry in physics in Warsaw in June 1976, Professor Wheeler gave an interview for the Czechoslovak Journal of Physics A. After Professor Wheeler authorized the English version in…
In 1972, at a symposium celebrating the 70th birthday of Paul Dirac, John Wheeler proclaimed that "the framework falls down for everything that one has ever called a law of physics". Responsible for this "breakage [...] among the laws of…
In his 1989 essay, John Archibald Wheeler has tried to answer the eternal question of existence. He did it by searching for links between information, physics, and quanta. The main concept emerging from his essay is that "every physical…
Throughout John Wheeler's career, he wrestled with big issues like the fundamental length, the black hole and the unification of quantum mechanics and relativity. In this essay, I argue that solid state physics -- historically the study of…
John Wheeler advocated the principle that information is the foundation of physics and asked us to reformulate physics in terms of bits. The goal is to consider what we know already and work out a new mathematical theory in which space,…
Julian Schwinger's influence on twentieth century science is profound and pervasive. Of course, he is most famous for his renormalization theory of quantum electrodynamics, for which he shared the Nobel Prize with Richard Feynman and…
The authority of J. A. Wheeler in many areas of gravitational physics is immense, and there is a connection with the study of relic gravitational waves as well. I begin with a brief description of Wheeler's influence on this study. One part…
This chapter is based on a talk given at the Science and Ultimate Reality meeting in March, 2002, in honour of John Archibald Wheeler. In it, I discuss some questions related to what can and cannot be said about the history of a quantum…
I shall use a few personal reminiscences of my time as a student and colleague of Dirac in Cambridge to introduce some reflections on the nature of research in theoretical physics. I shall discuss and illustrate the approach of Dirac to his…
A theory of vector gravitational waves is presented on the basis of an additional gravitational field, recovering ideas that go back to H. A. Lorentz, field that A. Wheeler called ``gravitomagnetism''. The theory is independent of…
Julian Schwinger's influence on Twentieth Century science is profound and pervasive. Of course, he is most famous for his renormalization theory of quantum electrodynamics, for which he shared the Nobel Prize with Richard Feynman and…
A complete history of early atomic models would fill volumes, but a reasonably coherent tale of the path from mechanical atoms to the quantum can be told by focusing on the relevant work of three great contributors to atomic physics, in the…
Modern atomic and nuclear physics took its start in the early part of the twentieth century, to a large extent based upon experimental investigations of radioactive phenomena. Foremost among the pioneers of the new kind of physics was…
These notes are an outgrowth of an advanced undergraduate course taught at the University of Maryland, College Park. They are intended as an introduction to various aspects of particle and nuclear physics with an emphasis on the role of…
My collaboration and friendship with John Bell is recollected. I will explain his outstanding contributions in particle physics, in accelerator physics, and his joint work with Mary Bell. Mary's work in accelerator physics is also…
John St. Bell was a physicist working most of his time at CERN and contributing intensively and sustainably to the development of Particle Physics and Collider Physics. As a hobby he worked on so-called "foundations of quantum theory", that…
This memoir honors the late Berni Julian Alder, who inspired both of us with his pioneering development of molecular dynamics. Berni's work with Tom Wainwright, described in the 1959 Scientific American[1], brought Bill to interview at…
The discovery of atomic nucleus by E. Rutherford, at the beginning of the twentieth century, was the Nuclear Physics original landmark. From then, a series of experiments in which beams of particles composed of neutrons, protons and others,…