Related papers: John Archibald Wheeler: A Biographical Memoir
A brief overview of loop quantum cosmology of homogeneous isotropic models is presented with emphasis on the origin of and subtleties associated with the resolution of big bang and big crunch singularities. These results bear out the…
I present the background of the Bohm approach that led John Bell to a study of quantum non-locality from which his famous inequalities emerged. I recall the early experiments done at Birkbeck with an aim to explore the possibility of…
Donald Lynden-Bell's many contributions to astrophysics encompass general relativity, galactic dynamics, telescope design and observational astronomy. In the 1960s, his papers on stellar dynamics led to fundamental insights into the…
Richard P. Feynman's work on gravitation, as can be inferred from several published and unpublished sources, is reviewed. Feynman was involved with this subject at least from late 1954 to the late 1960s, giving several pivotal contributions…
The career and accomplishments of Julian Schwinger, who shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1965, have been reviewed in numerous books and articles. For this reason these Memories, which seek to convey a sense of Schwinger's remarkable…
I had the marvelous good fortune to be Ken Wilson's graduate student at the Physics Department, Cornell University, from 1972 to 1976. In this article, I present some recollections of how this came about, my interactions with Ken, and…
Stirling Colgate was a remarkably imaginative physicist, an independent thinker with a wide breadth of interests and contagious enthusiasm, a born leader with enduring drive to attack fundamental problems in science. Among his many…
James Burkett Hartle was a theoretical physicist who made major contributions to our understanding of relativistic stars, black holes, and cosmology. Most of his career, however, was devoted to studying the universe as a quantum system. As…
One of the most important philosophers in history, the German Friedrich Nietzsche, is almost ignored by physicists. This author who declared the death of God in the 19th century was a science enthusiast, especially in the second period of…
Although he was the recipient of a Nobel Prize and despite the greatness of his accomplishments, Julian Schwinger is almost an unsung hero of our age . He is relatively unknown to the general population, even though in the physics community…
It is well known that Wheeler proposed several delayed choice experiments in order to show the impossibility to speak of the way a quantum system behaves before being detected. In a double-slit experiment, when do photons decide to travel…
The Principle of Relativity has so far been understood as the {\it covariance} of laws of Physics with respect to a general class of reference frame transformations. That relativity, however, has only been expressed with the help of {\it…
Professor Tom Kibble was an internationally-renowned theoretical physicist whose contributions to theoretical physics range from the theory of elementary particles to modern early-universe cosmology. The unifying theme behind all his work…
The direct interaction theory of electromagnetism, also known as Wheeler-Feynman electrodynamics, is often misinterpreted and found unappealing because of its reference to the absorber and, more importantly, to the so-called absorber…
Without Niels Bohr, QBism would be nothing. But QBism is not Bohr. This paper attempts to show that, despite a popular misconception, QBism is no minor tweak to Bohr's interpretation of quantum mechanics. It is something quite distinct.…
Gedankenexperiments have consistently played a major role in the development of quantum theory. A paradigmatic example is Wheeler's delayed-choice experiment, a wave-particle duality test that cannot be fully understood using only classical…
The breadth of Eugene Wigner's interests and contributions is amazing and humbling. At different times in his life he did seminal work in areas as diverse as pure mathematics and chemical engineering. His seminal research in physics is, of…
Similarities between the non-deterministic nature of quantum theory and the unpredictable patterns of human cognition and decision making have been observed and commented on many times since the invention of Quantum Mechanics in the first…
The 1950s-- and perhaps also the 1960s-- were very special times for the development of solid-state/condensed-matter physics. The University of Illinois at Urbana was at the center of these activities. In areas like NMR and…
Julian Schwinger began the construction of Source Theory in 1966 in response to the then apparent failure of quantum field theory to describe strong interactions, the physical remoteness of renormalization, and the utility of effective…