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3 unusual facts about John Archibald Wheeler


Absolute time and space


—Ernst Mach; as quoted by Ciufolini and Wheeler: Gravitation and Inertia, p. 387

Arthur Komar

His PhD dissertation was supervised by John Archibald Wheeler, titled Some Consequences of Mach’s Principle for General Relativity.

One-electron universe

Feynman's thesis advisor, John Wheeler, proposed the hypothesis in a telephone call to Feynman in the spring of 1940.


Arthur Wightman

Advised by John Wheeler, his 1949 Princeton doctoral dissertation was entitled The Moderation and Absorption of Negative Pions in Hydrogen.

George Yuri Rainich

According to some sources, Peter Gabriel Bergmann brought Rainich's suggestion that algebraic topology (and knot theory in particular) should play a role in physics to the attention of John Archibald Wheeler, which shortly led to the Ph.D. thesis of Charles W. Misner.

Inhomogeneous electromagnetic wave equation

Charles W. Misner, Kip S. Thorne, John Archibald Wheeler, Gravitation, (1970) W.H. Freeman, New York; ISBN 0-7167-0344-0.

Merlin of Amber

By Merlin's description Ghostwheel's operations involve "a lot of theoretical crap involving space and time and some notions of some guys named Everett and Wheeler".

Minkowski diagram

Edwin F. Taylor and John Archibald Wheeler (1963) Spacetime Physics, pages 27 to 38, New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, Second edition (1992).

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

Starting with the development of symbolic written language (and the eventual perceived need for a dictionary), Gleick examines the history of intellectual insights central to information theory, detailing the key figures responsible such as Claude Shannon, Charles Babbage, Ada Byron, Samuel Morse, Alan Turing, Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins and John Archibald Wheeler.

Wormhole

However, in 1962 John A. Wheeler and Robert W. Fuller published a paper showing that this type of wormhole is unstable if it connects two parts of the same universe, and that it will pinch off too quickly for light (or any particle moving slower than light) that falls in from one exterior region to make it to the other exterior region.


see also