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Gravitation and general relativity were his passion Wheeler said “When they emerged, I finally had a calling” (MacPherson). General relativity in 1950s before Wheeler “had become a backwater of physics. It was more a branch of mathematics than of physics, and a not very interesting one. Among the world's leading physicists at the time, only Wheeler envisioned a future in which curved spacetime would be fundamental to the nature of matter and the astrophysical universe. Because, in his words, relativity is too important to leave to the mathematicians” (Misner).  After
much of his
government work was done he began teaching a
class on Einsteinian gravity and
soon after began working with Einstein on
unified field theory in the
mid-1950s. In 1956 when working on cold stars he
determined that dead stars
would mainly be iron because of fusion and would
publish the Harrison-Wheeler
Equation of State for Cold, Dead Matter. The next year he introduced
the wormhole which is a space-time tunnel. Along
with the wormhole other terms
he is known for are geons, quantum foam, and
black holes. He worked in
gravitational collapse, grand unified theory,
general relativity, and quantum
theory in the 1950s and through the 1970s. In
this time he worked with Bryce
Dewitt and came up with the Wheeler-DeWitt
Equation or as Wheeler called it
“wave function of the universe.” Retiring from
Princeton in 1976 he moved to
Texas and became the director of the Center for
Theoretical Physics at the
University of Texas Austin. He stayed for ten
years then return to Princeton as
professor emeritus. All
throughout his
career Wheeler continued to teach freshman and
sophomore classes believing he
could make a difference with the young students
and that through teaching he learned
also. “Looking
back over his own
career, Wheeler divided it into three parts.
Until the 1950s, a phase he called
"Everything Is Particles," he was looking for
ways to build all basic
entities, such as neutrons and protons, out of
the lightest, most fundamental
particles. The second part, which he termed
"Everything Is Fields,"
was when he viewed the world as one made out of
fields in which particles were
mere manifestations of electrical, magnetic and
gravitational fields and
space-time itself. More recently, in a period he
viewed as "Everything Is
Information," he focused on the idea that logic
and information is the
bedrock of physical theory.” (Krishna) |
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| Michael Pritchard PHYS 212X |