SUMMARY: This offering is a holograph note in which Wheeler sens a quote regarding the nture of the universe. Price:$345.00

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John Archibald Wheeler (1911 – 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 terms black hole and wormhole and the phrase "it from bit".

This offering is a post card from The Center for Theoretical Physics with an AQS, July 28, 1978, "We will first understand how simple the universe is when we recognize how srange it is" signed Best Wishes John Aechibakld Wheeler. In a hologrph post script Wheeler recommends his book on relativity ( see below). The card is in excellent condition and the writing is all in Wheeler's hand.

Wheeler was a professor of physics at Princeton University from 1938 until 1976 and the director of the Center for Theoretical Physics at the University of Texas at Austin from 1976 to 1986. At the time of his death, he had returned to Princeton as a professor emeritus. Professor Wheeler's graduate students include Richard Feynman, Kip Thorne, and Hugh Everett. Unlike some scholars, he gave a high priority to teaching. Even after he had achieved fame, he continued to teach freshman and sophomore physics, saying that the young minds were the most important.Wheeler made important contributions to theoretical physics. In 1937, he introduced the S-matrix, which became an indispensable tool in particle physics. He was a pioneer in the theory of nuclear fission, along with Niels Bohr and Enrico Fermi. In 1939, he collaborated with Bohr on the liquid drop model of nuclear fission.

Together with many other leading physicists, during World War II, Wheeler interrupted his academic career to participate in the development of the U.S. atomic bomb under the Manhattan Project at the Hanford site, where reactors were constructed to produce the chemical element plutonium for atomic bombs. Even before the Hanford site started up the B-Pile (the first of three reactors), he had anticipated that the accumulation of "fission product poisons" would eventually impede the ongoing nuclear chain reaction by absorbing neutrons, and he correctly deduced (by calculating the half-life decay rates) that an isotope of xenon (Xe135) would be most responsible.[2] He went on to work on the development of the American hydrogen bomb under Project Matterhorn.

After concluding his Manhattan Project work, Wheeler returned to Princeton to resume his academic career. In 1957, while working on extensions to general relativity, he introduced the word wormhole to describe hypothetical tunnels in space-time.

Wheeler was the driving force behind the voluminous general relativity textbook Gravitation, co-written with Charles W. Misner and Kip Thorne. Its timely appearance during the golden age of general relativity and its comprehensiveness made it the most influential relativity textbook for a generation.

Wheeler's life reminds one of the quote frm Pasteur--"Science has no country but every scientist has one."

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Price: $ 345.00