Zenith Grant Awardee
Dean Rickles
University of Sydney
Project Title
Radical Conservative: A Biography of John Archibald Wheeler
Project Summary
Agency was at the heart of John Wheeler's work, especially in his later years where it was explicitly embodied in the concept of the "observer-participant" (now undergoing a renaissance in physics). He sought to base a theory of existence itself on it through his idea of a "self-excited circuit," thus putting agency at the heart of it all. This project will trace the development of his ideas, including the emergence of this deeper level of thinking about reality, by writing the first ever biography of the man and his work (to be entitled "Radical Conservative: A Biography of John Archibald Wheeler"). The book will be about a hyperactive scientist's quest to understand the meaning of existence ("the whole show"), with life and mind centre stage.
Technical Abstract
Agency was at the heart of John Wheeler's work, especially in his later years where it was explicitly embodied in the concept of the "observer-participant" (now undergoing a renaissance in physics). He sought to base a theory of existence itself on it through his idea of a "self-excited circuit," thus putting agency at the heart of it all. This project will trace the development of Wheeler's ideas, including the emergence of this deeper level of thinking about reality, by writing the first ever biography of the man and his work (to be entitled "Radical Conservative: A Biography of John Archibald Wheeler"). The book will be about a hyperactive scientist's quest to understand the meaning of existence ("the whole show"), with life and mind centre stage. The absence of a serious, scholarly biography of Wheeler marks a curious and unacceptable gap. Wheeler deserves to be far better known: his imprint can be found all over modern physics, including his lesser known influence, no less important, behind the scenes. No matter how crazy his ideas seemed initially, they always seem to come out right. We will see that his life is as rich and complex as his ideas in physics.
QSpace Latest
PressRelease: Out of the string theory swampland
String theory has long been touted as physicists’ best candidate for describing the fundamental nature of the universe, with elementary particles and forces described as vibrations of tiny threads of energy. But in the early 21st century, it was realized that most of the versions of reality described by string theory’s equations cannot match up with observations of our own universe. In particular, conventional string theory’s predictions are incompatible with the observation of dark energy, which appears to be causing our universe’s expansion to speed up, and with viable theories of quantum gravity, instead predicting a vast ‘swampland’ of impossible universes. Now, a new analysis by FQxI physicist Eduardo Guendelman, of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Israel, shows that an exotic subset of string models–in which the tension of strings is generated dynamically–could provide an escape route out of the string theory swampland. The analysis was reported in The European Physical Journal C, in March.