Status
Available
Call number
Collection
Publication
Basic Books (2017), Edition: Illustrated, 336 pages
Description
"In Fall 1939, Richard Feynman, a brash and brilliant recent graduate of MIT, arrived in John Wheeler's Princeton office to report for duty as his teaching assistant. The prim and proper Wheeler timed their interaction with a watch placed on the table. Feynman caught on, and for the next meeting brought his own cheap watch, set it on the table next to Wheeler's, and also began timing the chat. The two had a hearty laugh and a lifelong friendship was born. At first glance, they would seem an unlikely pair. Feynman was rough on the exterior, spoke in a working class Queens accent, and loved playing bongo drums, picking up hitchhikers, and exploring out-of-the way places. Wheeler was a family man, spoke softly and politely, dressed in suits, and had the manners of a minister. Yet intellectually, their roles were reversed. Wheeler was a raging nonconformist, full of wild ideas about space, time, and the universe. Feynman was very cautious in his research, wanting to prove and confirm everything himself. Yet when Feynman saw merit in one of Wheeler's crazy ideas and found that it matched experimental data, their joint efforts paid off phenomenally"--… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member fpagan
A double half-biography emphasizing the scientific work of the two American-physicist subjects, starting around 1940 when RF (1918 - 1988) became a PhD student of JW (1911 - 2008). Most of the material on RF will be already familiar to those who have read one of the several full biographies of him.
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An example of something perhaps less well known is how it was JW who was responsible for the initial obscuration of the full radicality of the work -- the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics -- done by another of his PhD students, Hugh Everett. Show Less
LibraryThing member DavidWineberg
There are two natural divisions in quantum mechanics. The first focused in Europe, from Planck through Einstein to Heisenberg. The second was in the United States, with European refugees working around the likes of Richard Feynman and John Wheeler in the runup to the second world war. The Quantum
John Wheeler and Richard Feynman form the spine of the story. They encounter and work with literally everyone who mattered in the discipline. That they met is remarkable. Feymnan transferred to Princeton specifically to become a teaching assistant to Eugene Wigner. Instead, he was assigned to Wheeler. Wheeler turned out to be just seven years older than Feynman, and had a very similar sense of himself and science. The two of them hit it off immediately, and spent endless hours laughing at everything and nothing together. Eventually Wheeler became Feynman’s Phd advisor, and they worked together basically the rest of their lives. Their discoveries fill book shelves.
Nothing in quantum mechanics was too wild for Wheeler. He dreamed in Technicolor. Feynman, no slouch in the imagination department either, took Wheeler’s ideas and provided mathematical proof and justification (where possible), not a year later, but in hours. Not to put too fine a point on it, Feynman obtained his doctorate in three years. Together they assaulted the boundaries and pushed them off in new directions.
The book is at its best when Halpern tells stories showing the physicists’ human side. When Feynman gave his first public lecture at Princeton, “a collection of monster minds” attended. Names like Von Neumann, Wigner, Pauli and Einstein. Before it began, Einstein interrupted Feynman at the blackboard and asked where the tea was. Feynman said he was relieved to be able to answer at least one of Einstein’s questions.
Wheeler invented the wormhole, named Feynman’s method sum over histories, and promoted the term black hole in popular science. When the universe was not enough, he tackled information – the world of bits instead of subatomic particles. It was a Wheeler brainstorm that led to the theory there was just one electron, racing around the universe showing itself.
What weakness there is in The Quantum Labyrinth is in Halpern’s discussions of quantum mechanics. It’s his profession, and he doesn’t make it easy for readers. What usually happens is Wheeler or Feynman has made some huge discovery, and Halpern asks us to step back to understand the mechanics of it., right down to the fundamentals. There is no math, but it is still dense.
It turns out physicists are real people, with quirks as well as quarks. Bohr mumbled incoherently. Dirac was painfully introverted. Feynman was always up for adventure. He played bongos into the wee hours (it was cited in his divorce), acted in plays at Caltech and was the most entertaining lecturer anyone had ever experienced: “a magician of the highest caliber.”
The story has not ended, of course. There continue to be more questions than answers, and it gets worse with every discovery and every new theory. The labyrinth is of their own making. That no one can find the way out is a clear indication that much of what is claimed is simply wrong. The value of The Quantum Labyrinth is the real, human side of this voyage of discovery.
David Wineberg
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Labyrinth is about this second era, from the late thirties onward. It is as much biography as science. Paul Halpern has pulled together the lives of numerous protagonists, giving them humanity and human foibles amidst the admittedly difficult and bizarre world of quantum mechanics. Feynman himself famously declared that no one understands quantum mechanics. And he was in the eye of the storm.John Wheeler and Richard Feynman form the spine of the story. They encounter and work with literally everyone who mattered in the discipline. That they met is remarkable. Feymnan transferred to Princeton specifically to become a teaching assistant to Eugene Wigner. Instead, he was assigned to Wheeler. Wheeler turned out to be just seven years older than Feynman, and had a very similar sense of himself and science. The two of them hit it off immediately, and spent endless hours laughing at everything and nothing together. Eventually Wheeler became Feynman’s Phd advisor, and they worked together basically the rest of their lives. Their discoveries fill book shelves.
Nothing in quantum mechanics was too wild for Wheeler. He dreamed in Technicolor. Feynman, no slouch in the imagination department either, took Wheeler’s ideas and provided mathematical proof and justification (where possible), not a year later, but in hours. Not to put too fine a point on it, Feynman obtained his doctorate in three years. Together they assaulted the boundaries and pushed them off in new directions.
The book is at its best when Halpern tells stories showing the physicists’ human side. When Feynman gave his first public lecture at Princeton, “a collection of monster minds” attended. Names like Von Neumann, Wigner, Pauli and Einstein. Before it began, Einstein interrupted Feynman at the blackboard and asked where the tea was. Feynman said he was relieved to be able to answer at least one of Einstein’s questions.
Wheeler invented the wormhole, named Feynman’s method sum over histories, and promoted the term black hole in popular science. When the universe was not enough, he tackled information – the world of bits instead of subatomic particles. It was a Wheeler brainstorm that led to the theory there was just one electron, racing around the universe showing itself.
What weakness there is in The Quantum Labyrinth is in Halpern’s discussions of quantum mechanics. It’s his profession, and he doesn’t make it easy for readers. What usually happens is Wheeler or Feynman has made some huge discovery, and Halpern asks us to step back to understand the mechanics of it., right down to the fundamentals. There is no math, but it is still dense.
It turns out physicists are real people, with quirks as well as quarks. Bohr mumbled incoherently. Dirac was painfully introverted. Feynman was always up for adventure. He played bongos into the wee hours (it was cited in his divorce), acted in plays at Caltech and was the most entertaining lecturer anyone had ever experienced: “a magician of the highest caliber.”
The story has not ended, of course. There continue to be more questions than answers, and it gets worse with every discovery and every new theory. The labyrinth is of their own making. That no one can find the way out is a clear indication that much of what is claimed is simply wrong. The value of The Quantum Labyrinth is the real, human side of this voyage of discovery.
David Wineberg
Show Less
LibraryThing member witchyrichy
In The Quantum Labyrinth: How Richard Feynman and John Wheeler Revolutionized Time and Reality, author Paul Halpern paints a mostly loving portrait of two leaders in the development and exploration of quantum physics. My scientist father loaned me the book, and it took several tries to get through
Both men were passionate teachers and used teaching as a way to learn themselves. When John Wheeler, for example, realized that, in order to solve a particular problem, he would need to better understand general relativity:
The best way to learn a field was to teach it, Wheeler had found. he had acquired the habit of assembling meticulous lecture notes for each course, which could double as an excellent resource whenever he continued to research a subject. Often in his notebooks, he scattered speculation among his course notes. He might ask those questions of his students, consider them himself, or both. Learning begets teaching, which begets more learning, in a marvelous spiral of rising knowledge. (p. 173).
In fact, Halpern writes, because physics is "built from the ground up, based on fundamental principles that might be stated or interpreted in many ways...Even concepts typically addressed in the first weeks of an introductory physics course, such as force and inertia, are nuanced" (p. 22). According to Halpern, working together on Wheeler's classical mechanics course at Princeton led to conversations about Mach's principle of distant stars causing inertia and how it might still be relevant when we know the universe is expanding. These conversations spilled over into the classroom as they challenged their students to think hard about the concepts.
Feynman, of course, became known as the great explainer.
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it. I finally convinced myself that I could appreciate the story of two incredible thinkers without completely understanding the science.Both men were passionate teachers and used teaching as a way to learn themselves. When John Wheeler, for example, realized that, in order to solve a particular problem, he would need to better understand general relativity:
The best way to learn a field was to teach it, Wheeler had found. he had acquired the habit of assembling meticulous lecture notes for each course, which could double as an excellent resource whenever he continued to research a subject. Often in his notebooks, he scattered speculation among his course notes. He might ask those questions of his students, consider them himself, or both. Learning begets teaching, which begets more learning, in a marvelous spiral of rising knowledge. (p. 173).
In fact, Halpern writes, because physics is "built from the ground up, based on fundamental principles that might be stated or interpreted in many ways...Even concepts typically addressed in the first weeks of an introductory physics course, such as force and inertia, are nuanced" (p. 22). According to Halpern, working together on Wheeler's classical mechanics course at Princeton led to conversations about Mach's principle of distant stars causing inertia and how it might still be relevant when we know the universe is expanding. These conversations spilled over into the classroom as they challenged their students to think hard about the concepts.
Feynman, of course, became known as the great explainer.
Show Less
Language
Original language
English
Physical description
336 p.; 9.75 inches
ISBN
0465097588 / 9780465097586