John Archibald Wheeler (July 9, 1911 – April
13, 2008) was an American theoretical physicist.
He was largely responsible for reviving interest
in general relativity in the United States
after World War II. Wheeler also worked with
Niels Bohr in explaining the basic principles
behind nuclear fission. Together with Gregory
Breit, Wheeler developed the concept of the
Breit–Wheeler process. He is best known
for linking the term "black hole" to objects
with gravitational collapse already predicted
early in the 20th century, for coining the
terms "quantum foam", "neutron moderator",
"wormhole" and "it from bit", and for hypothesizing
the "one-electron universe".
Wheeler earned his doctorate at Johns Hopkins
University under the supervision of Karl Herzfeld,
and studied under Breit and Bohr on a National
Research Council fellowship. In 1939 he teamed
up with Bohr to write a series of papers using
the liquid drop model to explain the mechanism
of fission. During World War II, he worked
with the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical
Laboratory in Chicago, where he helped design
nuclear reactors, and then at the Hanford
Site in Richland, Washington, where he helped
DuPont build them. He returned to Princeton
after the war ended, but returned to government
service to help design and build the hydrogen
bomb in the early 1950s.
For most of his career, Wheeler was a professor
at Princeton University, which he joined in
1938, remaining until his retirement in 1976.
At Princeton he supervised 46 PhDs, more than
any other professor in the Princeton physics
department.
== Early life and education ==
Wheeler was born in Jacksonville, Florida
on July 9, 1911 to librarians Joseph Lewis
Wheeler and Mabel Archibald (Archie) Wheeler.
He was the oldest of four children, having
two younger brothers, Joseph and Robert, and
a younger sister, Mary. Joseph earned a Ph.D.
from Brown University and a Master of Library
Science from Columbia University. Robert earned
a Ph.D. in geology from Harvard University
and worked as a geologist for oil companies
and at colleges. Mary studied library science
at the University of Denver and became a librarian.
They grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, but spent
a year in 1921 to 1922 on a farm in Benson,
Vermont, where Wheeler attended a one-room
school. After they returned to Youngstown
he attended Rayen High School.After graduating
from the Baltimore City College high school
in 1926, Wheeler entered Johns Hopkins University
with a scholarship from the state of Maryland.
He published his first scientific paper in
1930, as part of a summer job at the National
Bureau of Standards. He earned his doctorate
in 1933. His dissertation research work, carried
out under the supervision of Karl Herzfeld,
was on the "Theory of the Dispersion and Absorption
of Helium". He received a National Research
Council fellowship, which he used to study
under Gregory Breit at New York University
in 1933 and 1934, and then in Copenhagen under
Niels Bohr in 1934 and 1935. In a 1934 paper,
Breit and Wheeler introduced the Breit–Wheeler
process, a mechanism by which photons can
be potentially transformed into matter in
the form of electron-positron pairs.
== Early career ==
The University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill made Wheeler an associate professor in
1937, but he wanted to be able work more closely
with the experts in particle physics. He turned
down an offer in 1938 of an associate professorship
at Johns Hopkins University in favor of an
assistant professorship at Princeton University.
Although it was a lesser position, he felt
that Princeton, which was building up its
physics department, was a better career choice.
He remained a member of the faculty there
until 1976.In a 1937 paper "On the Mathematical
Description of Light Nuclei by the Method
of Resonating Group Structure", Wheeler introduced
the S-matrix – short for scattering matrix
– "a unitary matrix of coefficients connecting
the asymptotic behavior of an arbitrary particular
solution [of the integral equations] with
that of solutions of a standard form." Werner
Heisenberg subsequently developed the idea
of the S-matrix in the 1940s. Due to the problematic
divergences present in quantum field theory
at that time, Heisenberg was motivated to
isolate the essential features of the theory
that would not be affected by future changes
as the theory developed. In doing so he was
led to introduce a unitary "characteristic"
S-matrix, which became an important tool in
particle physics.Wheeler did not develop the
S-matrix, but joined Edward Teller in examining
Bohr's liquid drop model of the atomic nucleus.
They presented their results at a meeting
of the American Physical Society in New York
in 1938. Wheeler's Chapel Hill graduate student
Katharine Way also presented a paper, which
she followed up in a subsequent article, detailing
how the liquid drop model was unstable under
certain conditions. Due to a limitation of
the liquid drop model, they all missed the
opportunity to predict nuclear fission. The
news of Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch's discovery
of fission was brought to America by Bohr
in 1939. Bohr told Leon Rosenfeld, who informed
Wheeler.Bohr and Wheeler set to work applying
the liquid drop model to explain the mechanism
of nuclear fission. As the experimental physicists
studied fission, they uncovered puzzling results.
George Placzek asked Bohr why uranium seemed
to fission with both very fast and very slow
neutrons. Walking to a meeting with Wheeler,
Bohr had an insight that the fission at low
energies was due to the uranium-235 isotope,
while at high energies it was mainly due to
the far more abundant uranium-238 isotope.
They co-wrote two more papers on fission.
Their first paper appeared in Physical Review
on September 1, 1939, the day Germany invaded
Poland, starting World War II in Europe.Considering
the notion that positrons were electrons that
were traveling backwards in time, he came
up in 1940 with his one-electron universe
postulate: that there was in fact only one
electron, bouncing back and forth in time.
His graduate student, Richard Feynman, found
this hard to believe, but the idea that positrons
were electrons traveling backwards in time
intrigued him and Feynman incorporated the
notion of the reversibility of time into his
Feynman diagrams.
== Nuclear weapons ==
=== Manhattan Project ===
Soon after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor
brought the United States into World War II,
Wheeler accepted a request from Arthur Compton
to join the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical
Laboratory at the University of Chicago. He
moved there in January 1942, joining Eugene
Wigner's group, which was studying nuclear
reactor design. He co-wrote a paper with Robert
F. Christy on "Chain Reaction of Pure Fissionable
Materials in Solution", which was important
in the plutonium purification process. It
would not be declassified until December 1955.
He gave the neutron moderator its name, replacing
the term "slower downer" used by Enrico Fermi.
After the United States Army Corps of Engineers
took over the Manhattan Project, it gave responsibility
for the detailed design and construction of
the reactors to DuPont. Wheeler became part
of the DuPont design staff. He worked closely
with its engineers, commuting between Chicago
and Wilmington, Delaware, where DuPont had
its headquarters. He moved his family to Wilmington
in March 1943. DuPont's task was not just
to build nuclear reactors, but an entire plutonium
production complex at the Hanford Site in
Washington. As work progressed, Wheeler relocated
his family again in July 1944, this time to
Richland, Washington, where he worked in the
scientific buildings known as the 300 area.Even
before the Hanford Site started up the B Reactor,
the first of its three reactors, on September
15, 1944, Wheeler had been concerned that
some nuclear fission products might turn out
to be nuclear poisons, the accumulation of
which would impede the ongoing nuclear chain
reaction by absorbing many of the thermal
neutrons that were needed to continue a chain
reaction. In an April 1942 report, he predicted
that this would reduce the reactivity by less
than one percent so long as no fission product
had a neutron capture cross section of more
than 100,000 barns. After the reactor unexpectedly
shut down, and then just as unexpectedly restarted
about fifteen hours later, he suspected iodine-135,
with a half life of 6.6 hours, and its daughter
product, xenon-135, which has a half life
of 9.2 hours. Xenon-135 turned out to have
a neutron capture cross-section of well over
2 million barns. The problem was corrected
by adding additional fuel rods to burn out
the poison.Wheeler had a personal reason for
working on the Manhattan Project. His brother
Joe, fighting in Italy, sent him a postcard
with a simple message: "Hurry up". It was
already too late: Joe was killed in October
1944. "Here we were," Wheeler later wrote,
"so close to creating a nuclear weapon to
end the war. I couldn't stop thinking then,
and haven't stopped thinking since, that the
war could have been over in October 1944."
Joe left a widow and baby daughter, Mary Jo,
who later married physicist James Hartle.
=== Hydrogen bomb ===
In August 1945 Wheeler and his family returned
to Princeton, where he resumed his academic
career. Working with Feynman, he explored
the possibility of physics with particles,
but not fields, and carried out theoretical
studies of the muon with Jayme Tiomno, resulting
in a series of papers on the topic, including
a 1949 paper in which Tiomno and Wheeler introduced
the "Tiomno Triangle", which related different
forms of radioactive decay. He also suggested
the use of muons as a nuclear probe. This
paper, written and privately circulated in
1949 but not published until 1953, resulted
in a series of measurements of the Chang radiation
emitted by muons. Muons are a component of
cosmic rays, and Wheeler became the founder
and first director of Princeton's Cosmic Rays
Laboratory, which received a substantial grant
of $375,000 from the Office of Naval Research
in 1948. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship
in 1946, which allowed him to spend the 1949–50
academic year in Paris.
The 1949 detonation of Joe-1 by the Soviet
Union prompted an all-out effort by the United
States, led by Teller, to develop the more
powerful hydrogen bomb in response. Henry
D. Smyth, Wheeler's department head at Princeton,
asked him to join the effort. Most physicists
were, like Wheeler, trying to re-establish
careers interrupted by the war and were reluctant
to face more disruption. Others had moral
objections. Those who agreed to participate
included Emil Konopinski, Marshall Rosenbluth,
Lothar Nordheim and Charles Critchfield, but
there was also now a body of experienced weapons
physicists at the Los Alamos Laboratory, led
by Norris Bradbury. Wheeler agreed to go to
Los Alamos after a conversation with Bohr.
Two of his graduate students from Princeton,
Ken Ford and John Toll, joined him there.At
Los Alamos, Wheeler and his family moved into
the house on "Bathtub Row" that had been occupied
by Robert Oppenheimer and his family during
the war. In 1950 there was no practical design
for a hydrogen bomb. Calculations by Stan
Ulam and others showed that Teller's "Classical
Super" would not work. Teller and Wheeler
created a new design known as "Alarm Clock",
but it was not a true thermonuclear weapon.
Not until January 1951 did Ulam come up with
a workable design.In 1951 Wheeler obtained
permission from Bradbury to set up a branch
office of the Los Alamos laboratory at Princeton,
known as Project Matterhorn, which had two
parts. Matterhorn S (for stellarator, another
name coined by Wheeler), under Lyman Spitzer,
investigated nuclear fusion as a power source.
Matterhorn B (for bomb), under Wheeler, engaged
in nuclear weapons research. Senior scientists
remained uninterested and aloof from the project,
so he staffed it with young graduate and post-doctoral
students. In January 1953 he was involved
in a security breach when he lost a highly
classified paper on lithium-6 and the hydrogen
bomb design during an overnight train trip.
This resulted in Wheeler being given an official
reprimand. Matterhorn B's efforts were crowned
by the success of the Ivy Mike nuclear test
at Enewetak Atoll in the Pacific, on November
1, 1953, which Wheeler witnessed. The yield
of the Ivy Mike "Sausage" device was reckoned
at 10.4 megatons of TNT (44 PJ), about 30
percent higher than Matterhorn B had estimated.
Matterhorn B was discontinued, but Matterhorn
S endures as the Princeton Plasma Physics
Laboratory.
== Later career in academia ==
After concluding his Matterhorn Project work,
Wheeler resumed his academic career. In a
1955 paper, he theoretically investigated
the geon, an electromagnetic or gravitational
wave that is held together in a confined region
by the attraction of its own field. He coined
the name as a contraction of "gravitational
electromagnetic entity." He found that the
smallest geon was a toroid the size of the
Sun, but millions of times heavier.
=== Geometrodynamics ===
During the 1950s Wheeler formulated geometrodynamics,
a program of physical and ontological reduction
of every physical phenomenon, such as gravitation
and electromagnetism, to the geometrical properties
of a curved space-time. His research on the
subject was published in 1957 and 1961. Wheeler
envisaged the fabric of the universe as a
chaotic sub-atomic realm of quantum fluctuations,
which he called "quantum foam".
=== General relativity ===
General relativity had been considered a less
respectable field of physics, being detached
from experiment. Wheeler was a key figure
in the revival of the subject, leading the
school at Princeton University, while Dennis
William Sciama and Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich
developed the subject at Cambridge University
and the University of Moscow, respectively.
Wheeler and his students made substantial
contributions to the field during the Golden
Age of General Relativity.While working on
mathematical extensions to Einstein's Theory
of General Relativity in 1957, Wheeler introduced
the concept and word wormhole to describe
hypothetical "tunnels" in space-time. Bohr
asked if they were stable and further research
by Wheeler determined that they are not. His
work in general relativity included the theory
of gravitational collapse. He used the term
black hole in 1967 during a talk he gave at
the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies
(GISS).Wheeler was also a pioneer in the field
of quantum gravity due to his development,
with Bryce DeWitt, of the Wheeler–DeWitt
equation in 1967. Stephen Hawking later described
Wheeler and DeWitt's work as the equation
governing the "wave function of the Universe".
=== Quantum information ===
Wheeler left Princeton University in 1976
at the age of 65. He was appointed as the
director of the Center for Theoretical Physics
at the University of Texas at Austin in 1976
and remained in the position until 1986, when
he retired and became a professor emeritus.
Misner, Thorne and Wojciech Zurek, all former
students of Wheeler, wrote that:
Looking back on Wheeler's 10 years at Texas,
many quantum information scientists now regard
him, along with IBM's Rolf Landauer, as a
grandfather of their field. That, however,
was not because Wheeler produced seminal research
papers on quantum information. He did not—with
one major exception, his delayed-choice experiment.
Rather, his role was to inspire by asking
deep questions from a radical conservative
viewpoint and, through his questions, to stimulate
others' research and discovery.
Wheeler's delayed choice experiment is actually
several thought experiments in quantum physics
that he proposed, with the most prominent
among them appearing in 1978 and 1984. These
experiments are attempts to decide whether
light somehow "senses" the experimental apparatus
in the double-slit experiment it will travel
through and adjusts its behavior to fit by
assuming the appropriate determinate state
for it, or whether light remains in an indeterminate
state, neither wave nor particle, and responds
to the "questions" asked of it by responding
in either a wave-consistent manner or a particle-consistent
manner depending on the experimental arrangements
that ask these "questions".
Wheeler's graduate students included Katharine
Way, Richard Feynman, David Hill, Bei-Lok
Hu, Kip Thorne, Jacob Bekenstein, John R.
Klauder, William Unruh, Robert M. Wald, Arthur
Wightman, Charles Misner, Max Tegmark and
Hugh Everett. Wheeler gave a high priority
to teaching, and continued to teach freshman
and sophomore physics, saying that the young
minds were the most important. With Kent Harrison,
Kip Thorne and Masami Wakano, Wheeler wrote
Gravitation Theory and Gravitational Collapse
(1965). This led to the voluminous general
relativity textbook Gravitation (1973), co-written
with Misner and Thorne. Its timely appearance
during the golden age of general relativity
and its comprehensiveness made it an influential
relativity textbook for a generation. Wheeler
teamed up with Edwin F. Taylor to write Spacetime
Physics (1966) and Scouting Black Holes (1996).
At Princeton he supervised 46 PhDs, more than
any other professor in the Princeton physics
department.
=== Teaching ===
Alluding to Wheeler's "mass without mass",
the festschrift honoring his 60th birthday
was titled Magic Without Magic: John Archibald
Wheeler: A Collection of Essays in Honor of
his Sixtieth Birthday (1972). His writing
style could also attract parodies, including
one by "John Archibald Wyler" that was affectionately
published by a relativity journal.
=== Participatory Anthropic Principle ===
Wheeler speculated that reality is created
by observers in the universe. "How does something
arise from nothing?", he asked about the existence
of space and time. He also coined the term
"Participatory Anthropic Principle" (PAP),
a version of a Strong Anthropic Principle.
In 1990, Wheeler suggested that information
is fundamental to the physics of the universe.
According to this "it from bit" doctrine,
all things physical are information-theoretic
in origin.
Wheeler: It from bit. Otherwise put, every
it — every particle, every field of force,
even the space-time continuum itself — derives
its function, its meaning, its very existence
entirely — even if in some contexts indirectly
— from the apparatus-elicited answers to
yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits.
It from bit symbolizes the idea that every
item of the physical world has at bottom — a
very deep bottom, in most instances — an
immaterial source and explanation; that which
we call reality arises in the last analysis
from the posing of yes-no questions and the
registering of equipment-evoked responses;
in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic
in origin and that this is a participatory
universe.
In developing the Participatory Anthropic
Principle (PAP), an interpretation of quantum
mechanics, Wheeler used a variant on Twenty
Questions, called Negative Twenty Questions,
to show how the questions we choose to ask
about the universe may dictate the answers
we get. In this variant, the respondent does
not choose or decide upon any particular or
definite object beforehand, but only on a
pattern of "Yes" or "No" answers. This variant
requires the respondent to provide a consistent
set of answers to successive questions, so
that each answer can be viewed as logically
compatible with all the previous answers.
In this way, successive questions narrow the
options until the questioner settles upon
a definite object. Wheeler's theory was that,
in an analogous manner, consciousness may
play some role in bringing the universe into
existence.From a transcript of a radio interview
on "The Anthropic Universe":
Wheeler: We are participators in bringing
into being not only the near and here but
the far away and long ago. We are in this
sense, participators in bringing about something
of the universe in the distant past and if
we have one explanation for what's happening
in the distant past why should we need more?
Martin Redfern: Many don't agree with John
Wheeler, but if he's right then we and presumably
other conscious observers throughout the universe,
are the creators — or at least the minds
that make the universe manifest.
=== Opposition to parapsychology ===
In 1979, Wheeler spoke to the American Association
for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), asking
it to expel parapsychology, which had been
admitted ten years earlier at the request
of Margaret Mead. He called it a pseudoscience,
saying he did not oppose earnest research
into the questions, but he thought the "air
of legitimacy" of being an AAAS-Affiliate
should be reserved until convincing tests
of at least a few so-called psi effects could
be demonstrated. In the question and answer
period following his presentation "Not consciousness,
but the distinction between the probe and
the probed, as central to the elemental quantum
act of observation", Wheeler incorrectly stated
that J. B. Rhine had committed fraud as a
student, for which he apologized in a subsequent
letter to the journal Science. His request
was turned down and the Parapsychological
Association remained a member of the AAAS.
== Personal life ==
For 72 years, Wheeler was married to Janette
Hegner, a teacher and social worker. They
became engaged on their third date, but agreed
to defer marriage until after he returned
from Europe. They were married on June 10,
1935, five days after his return. Jobs were
hard to come by during the Great Depression,
but Arthur Ruark offered Wheeler a position
as an assistant professor at the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, at an annual
salary of $2,300, which was less than the
$2,400 Janette was offered to teach at the
Rye Country Day School. They had three children:
Letitia, James English and Alison Wheeler.Wheeler
and Hegner were founding members of the Unitarian
Church of Princeton, and she initiated the
Friends of the Princeton Public Library. In
their later years, Hegner accompanied him
on sabbaticals in France, Los Alamos, New
Mexico, the Netherlands, and Japan. Hegner
died in October 2007 at the age of 99.
== Death and legacy ==
Wheeler was influential in mentoring a generation
of physicists of the Golden Age of General
Relativity, who made notable contributions
to quantum mechanics and gravitation.
Wheeler won numerous prizes and awards, including
the Enrico Fermi Award in 1968, the Franklin
Medal in 1969, the Einstein Prize in 1969,
the National Medal of Science in 1971, the
Niels Bohr International Gold Medal in 1982,
the Oersted Medal in 1983, the J. Robert Oppenheimer
Memorial Prize in 1984 and the Wolf Foundation
Prize in 1997. He was a member of the American
Philosophical Society, the Royal Academy,
the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, and the
Century Association. He received honorary
degrees from 18 different institutions. In
2001, Princeton used a $3 million gift to
establish the John Archibald Wheeler/Battelle
Professorship in Physics. After his death,
the University of Texas named the John A.
Wheeler Lecture Hall in his honor.On April
13, 2008, Wheeler died of pneumonia at the
age of 96 in Hightstown, New Jersey.
== Bibliography ==
Wheeler, John Archibald (1962). Geometrodynamics.
New York: Academic Press. OCLC 1317194.
Misner, Charles W.; Kip S. Thorne; John Archibald
Wheeler (September 1973). Gravitation. San
Francisco: W. H. Freeman. ISBN 0-7167-0344-0.
Wheeler, John Archibald (1979). Some Men and
Moments in the History of Nuclear Physics:
The Interplay of Colleagues and Motivations.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
OCLC 6025422.
Wheeler, John Archibald (1990). A Journey
Into Gravity and Spacetime. -Scientific American
Library. New York: W.H. Freeman. ISBN 0-7167-6034-7.
Taylor, Edwin F.; Wheeler, John Archibald
(1992). Spacetime Physics: Introduction to
Special Relativity'. New York: W. H. Freeman.
ISBN 0-7167-2327-1.
Wheeler, John Archibald (1994). At Home in
the Universe. New York: American Institute
of Physics. ISBN 1-56396-500-3.
Ciufolini, Ignazio; Wheeler, John Archibald
(1995). Gravitation and Inertia. Princeton,
New Jersey: Princeton University Press. ISBN
0-691-03323-4.
Wheeler, John Archibald (1998). Geons, Black
Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics.
New York: W.W. Norton & Co. ISBN 0-393-04642-7.
Taylor, Edwin F.; Wheeler, John Archibald
(2000). Exploring Black Holes: Introduction
to General Relativity. Addison Wesley. ISBN
0-201-38423-X.
== Notes ==
== References ==
Ford, Kenneth (Winter 2006). "Update on John
Archibald Wheeler" (PDF). Princeton Physics
News. 2 (1). Archived from the original (PDF)
on 2014-11-06.
Gardner, Martin (1981). Science: Good, Bad,
and Bogus. Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books.
ISBN 0-87975-144-4.
Gribbin, John; Gribbin, Mary; Gribbin, Jonathan
(2000). Q is for Quantum: An Encyclopedia
of Particle Physics. New York: Simon and Schuster.
ISBN 9780684863153. OCLC 43411619.
Hawking, Stephen; Gibbons, G. W.; Shellard,
E. P. S.; Rankin, S. J. (2003). The Future
of Theoretical Physics and Cosmology: Celebrating
Stephen Hawking's 60th birthday. Cambridge,
U.K.: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-82081-3.
OCLC 51324005.
Jones, Vincent (1985). Manhattan: The Army
and the Atomic Bomb (PDF). Washington, D.C.:
United States Army Center of Military History.
OCLC 10913875. Retrieved 8 June 2013.
Leonhart, James Chancellor (1939). One Hundred
Years of the Baltimore City College. Baltimore:
H. G. Roebuck & Son.
Mehra, Jagdish; Rechenberg, Helmut (1982).
The Historical Development of Quantum Theory.
New York: Springer. ISBN 978-0-387-95086-0.
OCLC 7944997.
Misner, Charles W. (2010). "John Wheeler and
the Reccertification of General Relativity
as True Physics". In Ciufolini and, Ignazio;
Matzner, Richard A. General Relativity and
John Archibald Wheeler. New York: Springer.
doi:10.1007/978-90-481-3735-0_2. ISBN 9789048137350.
Rhodes, Richard (1986). The Making of the
Atomic Bomb. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN
0-671-44133-7. OCLC 13793436.
Rhodes, Richard (1995). Dark Sun: The Making
of the Hydrogen Bomb. New York: Simon & Schuster.
ISBN 0-684-80400-X. OCLC 32509950.
Saunders, Simon (2010). Many Worlds? Everett,
Quantum Theory, and Reality. New York: Oxford
University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-956056-1.
Weinberg, Alvin (1994). The First Nuclear
Era: The Life and Times of a Technological
Fixer. New York: AIP Press. ISBN 1-56396-358-2.
Wheeler, John A. (1990). "Information, physics,
quantum: The search for links". In Zurek,
Wojciech Hubert. Complexity, Entropy, and
the Physics of Information. Redwood City,
California: Addison-Wesley. ISBN 978-0-201-51509-1.
OCLC 21482771.
Wheeler, John Archibald; Ford, Kenneth (1998).
Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life
in Physics. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. ISBN
0-393-04642-7.
Wheeler, John Archibald (1987). Cosmology,
Physics and Philosophy (2nd ed.). New York:
Springer Verlag. ISBN 0-387-90581-2.
== External links ==
1965 Audio Interview with John Wheeler by
Stephane Groueff, Voices of the Manhattan
Project
1986 Audio Interview with John Wheeler by
S. L. Sanger, Voices of the Manhattan Project
A Collection of John Archibald Wheeler's Published
and Unpublished Works
Wheeler's Classic Delayed Choice Experiment
Oral History interview transcript with John
Archibald Wheeler 5 April 1967, American Institute
of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives
at the Wayback Machine (archived October 1,
2013)
Oral History interview transcript with John
Archibald Wheeler 6 December 1993, American
Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and
Archives at the Wayback Machine (archived
December 10, 2014)
Cosmic Search Vol. 1 No. 4, FORUM: John A.
Wheeler
John Wheeler telling his life story at Web
of Stories
Wheeler —Biographical stories
John Archibald Wheeler: A Study of Mentoring
in Modern Physics
