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. The
brilliance and originality of each physicist stimulated the other's
imagination, leading to a rethinking of the nature of time and
reality that proved essential for late-20th century breakthroughs
in particle physics. Instead of a linear flow, Feynman's concept of
"sum over histories" showed how the path a particle takes is a
blend of all possible options that a particle could follow.
Wheeler's attempts to remake particle physics from the ground up,
spurred the now landmark idea of wormholes, and influenced his
student Hugh Everett's conception of the Many Worlds Interpretation
of quantum mechanics. The two thinkers pioneered the use of doodles
and diagrams in explaining quantum interactions, giving birth to
the now essential Feynman diagrams that show possible backward- and
forward-in-time paths for particles. And this is only the tip of
the iceberg. As The Quantum Labyrinth reveals in a riveting read,
together, Feynman and Wheeler made sure that quantum physics would
never be the same again.
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