"The first time I met Wheeler was in 1961, I was an undergraduate... with a somewhat unorthodox academic record. ...The hope was that ...I would be admitted as a graduate student... At the time I was working as a plumber... I was completely enthralled. John was enthusiastically describing his vision of how space and time would become a wild, jittery, foamy world of s when viewed through a tremendously powerful microscope. He told me that the most profound and exciting problem of physics was to unify Einstein's two great theories—General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. He explained that only at the Planck distance would elementary particles reveal their true nature, and it would be all about geometry—. To a young aspiring physicist, the stuffy businessman exterior had morphed into an idealistic visionary. I wanted more than anything to follow this man into battle."
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Academics from the United StatesPhysicists from the United StatesNational Medal of Science laureatesPeople from JacksonvilleWolf Prize in Physics laureates
Original Language: English
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Sources
Leonard Susskind, The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics (2008)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Archibald_Wheeler
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John Archibald Wheeler
John Archibald Wheeler (July 9, 1911 – April 13, 2008) was an eminent American theoretical physicist. One of the later collaborators of Albert Einstein, he tried to achieve Einstein's vision of a unified field theory. He is also known for having coined the term wormhole and the phrase "it from bit". He also popularized the term black hole (In December 1967, a student reportedly suggested the phrase "black hole" at a lecture by John Wheeler; Wheeler adopted the term for its brevity and "advertisi
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