Abstract
The borough of Princeton, New Jersey, is home to one of the most prestigious educational facilities in the world. Princeton University was founded in 1746, thirty years before the beginning of America’s war for independence. For more than fifty-five years now it has been the academic home of the man who today is arguably the most important figure in both physics and philosophy. His name is John Archibald Wheeler. He is a leader in the renewed dance of physics and philosophy.
Someday perhaps the inner light will shine forth from us, and then we shall need no other light.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Elective Affinities
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Notes
John A. Wheeler, “The Computer and the Universe,” International Journal of Theoretical Physics 21 (1982).
Michell was a fine example of the “amateur scientist” so prevalent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Though an Anglican priest by profession and not a “professional” scientist, Michell made significant contributions to several scientific disciplines. In addition to his treatise on magnets, Michell also wrote a paper in 1760 describing a mechanism for earthquakes. His hypothesis was remarkably accurate for its day. In 1783 he wrote a letter to Henry Cavendish containing the first theoretical description of what we today would call a black hole. For more on this last contribution to astrophysics, see Joel Davis, Journey to the Center of Our Galaxy (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1991, 1992), 131–132.
Henry built the first practical electromagnets and electrical motors in 1831, and by 1840 had developed an electrical relay that made the telegraph possible. Samuel Morse, credited with inventing the telegraph, actually worked closely with Henry and incorporated Henry’s ideas into his invention.
The first decades of the nineteenth century were a golden age for chemistry. For example, in 1803, the same year Dalton proposed his atomic theory of matter, Smithson Tennant discovered iridium and potassium and William Wollaston discovered palladium and rhodium. Louis-Nicolas Vauquelin discovered uric acid in 1811. The same year Amedeo Avogadro proposed that equal volumes of different gases contain equal numbers of particles, today known as Avogadro’s Law. Friederich Strohmeyer discovered cadmium in 1817. The prolific chemist Jon Jakob Berzelius discovered silicon in 1823, zirconium in 1824, and titanium in 1825.
They also introduced the terms anode, cathode, electrode, electrolyte,and electrolysis. Whewell, by the way, is the person who coined the term scientist. He introduced it in 1833 at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and popularized the word in his 1840 book The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences.
The charge, said Stoney, had a value of about 10-20 coulombs. This turned out to be very close to the actual known value of the electrical charge of an electron, which today is measured at 1.602 x 10-19 coulombs.
Planck’s constant, h,is measured in units of energy multiplied by time, known as action. Its numerical value is equal to about 6.63 x 10-34 J s (joule-seconds; a joule is the SI unit of work), or about 4.14 x 10-15 eV s (electron volt-seconds). In much of the mathematics of quantum mechanics, physicists use a variation of Planck’s constant symbolized by h (called “h-bar”); h = h/27r, and is equal to 1.054 x 10-34J s.
Einstein himself made another epochal contribution to physics in 1916. That was the year he published his theory of gravitation, known as the general theory of relativity.
Actually, electrons and other subatomic particles don’t really “spin.” These entities aren’t really tiny spheres with well-defined spin axes. “Spin” is a quantum property of entities that describes what a particle “looks like” from different directions. For example, a particle with spin 0 looks the same from any direction. A particle with spin 1 looks the same only after it has been “spun” 360 degrees. A particle with spin 2, on the other hand, looks the same when it makes a turn of only 180 degrees. And a particle with spin 2 must make two complete “revolutions” (720 degrees) before it looks the same as when it started! Today physicists divide all the subatomic particles in the universe into two general categories: those with “spin” of 2 and those with “spin” of 0, 1, and 2. The former includes the protons, neutrons, and electrons that make up atoms, which in turn make up matter. The latter category includes the subatomic particles that carry the forces—electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, the weak force, and gravity—that act on the former category of particles.
Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond ( New York: Harper, and Row, 1971 ), 38.
Max Born, Atomic Physics ( New York: Hafner, 1957 ), 102.
Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond,76.
John A. Wheeler and Wojciech H. Zurek, eds., Quantum Theory and Measurement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), i.
John Archibald Wheeler, “Law without Law,” in Wheeler and Zurek, eds., Quantum Theory and Measurement,183–213.
The line “Nature, red in tooth and claw” is from Alfred Tennyson s poem “In Memoriam,” published in 1850. Tennyson was born in 1809, eleven years after the publication of Lyrical Ballads,and died in 1892, the same year Fitzgerald and Lorentz devised their Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction formula to explain the failure of the Michelson-Morley experiments to detect the “ether.”
From William Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey.”
John A. Wheeler, The Frontiers of Time ( Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1979 ).
John A. Wheeler, “Beyond the Black Hole,” in Some Strangeness in Proportion, ed. Harry Woolf (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1980 ).
Quoted in Jeremy Bernstein, Quantum Profiles ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991 ), 96.
Berkeley’s position has been summarized in the humorous aphorism popular among college students for generations: “I no see you, you no be you.”
Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond,41.
The theological implications of this position are summed up in the following two limericks, quoted in J. C. Polkinghorne, The Quantum World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 66: There once was a man who said, “God Must think it exceedingly odd If he finds that this tree Continues to be When there’s no one around in the Quad.” Dear Sir, Your astonishment’s odd; I am always around in the Quad! And that’s why the tree Will continue to be, Since observed by Yours faithfully, God.
Fans of the fictional character Commander Data in the TV series “Star Trek: The Next Generation” may take exception to this. So may fans of Isaac Asimov’s robot stories, as well as many proponents of the development of artificial intelligence, or AI, in computers.
John A. Wheeler, “Our Universe: The Known and the Unknown,” American Scientists 56 (1968): 1.
It’s no longer a thought-experiment; various physicists have now conducted different versions of it.
Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man ( Boston: Little, Brown, 1973 ), 122.
Wheeler, “Law without Law,” 183.
Ibid.
Charles W. Misner, Kip S. Thorne, and John A. Wheeler, Gravitation ( San Francisco: Freeman, 1973 ), 23.
Wheeler, “Law without Law,” 192.
Ibid,184.
Ibid, 185.
Ibid, 194.
John Wheeler, “The Quantum and the Universe,” in Relativity, Quanta, and Cosmology, vol. 2, ed. M. Pantaleo and F. de Finis ( New York: Johnson Reprint Co., 1979 ).
A midrash is a kind of teaching story. Jesus used them frequently, according to the Gospels of the Christian Bible’s New Testament.They are called parables. The Christmas story in the Gospel of Matthew is also a good example of a midrash,as used by the Jewish—Christian communities of the early first century CE.
John A. Wheeler, “On the Nature of Quantum Geometrodynamics,” Annals of Physics 2 (1957): 604–614.
Wheeler, “Beyond the Black Hole.”
Wheeler, “Law without Law,” 209.
John Horgan, “Questioning the ‘It’ from ’Bit.”’ Scientific American 264 (June 1991): 37.
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© 1997 Joel Davis
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Davis, J. (1997). Quantum Realities. In: Alternate Realities. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-3440-6_4
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