John A.

Wheeler
1911–2008

A Biographical Memoir by
Kip S. Thorne

©2019 National Academy of Sciences.

Any opinions expressed in this memoir
are those of the author and do not
necessarily reflect the views of the
National Academy of Sciences.
JOHN ARCHIBALD WHEELER
July 9, 1911–April 13, 2008
Elected to the NAS, 1952

John Archibald Wheeler was a theoretical physicist who

worked on both down- to-earth projects and highly
speculative ideas, and always emphasized the importance

Photography by AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives

of experiment and observation, even when speculating
wildly. His research and insights had large impacts
on nuclear and particle physics, the design of nuclear
weapons, general relativity and relativistic astrophysics,
and quantum gravity and quantum information. But his
greatest impacts were through the students, postdocs,
and mature physicists whom he educated and inspired.
He was guided by what he called the “principle of radical
conservatism, ”inspired by Niels Bohr: Base your research
on well-established physical laws (be conservative), but
By Kip S. Thorne
push them into the most extreme conceivable domains
(be radical). He often pushed far beyond the boundaries
of well understood physics, speculating in prescient ways that inspired future generations
of physicists.

A fter completing his PhD. with Karl Herzfeld at Johns Hopkins University (1933),
Wheeler embarked on a postdoctoral year with Gregory Breit at New York University
(NYU) and another with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. He then moved to a three-year
assistant professorship at the University of North Carolina (1935–1937), followed by a
40-year professorial career at Princeton University (1937–1976) and then ten years as a
professor at the University of Texas, Austin (1976–1987). He returned to Princeton in
retirement but remained actively and intensely engaged with physics right up to his death
at age 96.
The ethos of John Archibald Wheeler
In demeanor, John Wheeler had an air of formality, so as a student I always called him
“Professor Wheeler”—a rather reverential “Professor Wheeler.” The day after I defended
my PhD. dissertation under his guidance, I telephoned his home and asked his wife

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Janette if I could speak with Professor Wheeler. In a kindly voice, she responded, “You
have your PhD. now, Kip, so you can call him Johnny,” and I have done so since then.
In this biographical memoir I’ll call him Wheeler, John, or, on rare occasion Johnny,
depending on the level of formality or personal affection I wish to convey.
Over the decades of our friendship, I came to appreciate and enjoy John’s playful side.
For example, he loved explosions, though at age ten he had mangled a forefinger and
thumb playing with dynamite caps. In 1971, at a large formal banquet in the Carlsberg
Mansion in Copenhagen, John surreptitiously lit a string of fire crackers and threw it
behind his chair to celebrate his 60th birthday. It caused quite a commotion among the
diners, but only I and perhaps one or two others sitting beside him were aware that he
was the culprit, and why. He kept a completely straight face.
John understood the psychological impact that a pithy phrase or the name of a concept
could have on researchers and nonscientists alike, so he spent much time lying in a bath
of warm water, thinking about possible names and phrases. Among his coinages are2
• Sum-over-histories (for Feynman’s path-integral formulation of quantum
mechanics)
• Moderator (for the material that slows neutrons in a nuclear reactor)
• Stellarator (for a plasma magnetic-confinement device)
• Wormhole (for a topological handle in the geometry of curved space)
• Black hole (for the object left behind when a star implodes)
• A single quantum cannot be cloned (for a theorem that limits quantum
amplifiers)
• It from bit (John’s speculation that quantum information is the foundation
of all reality)
• A black hole has no hair (for uniqueness theorems about black holes).
Regarding “no hair,” Janette once commented to me about Johnny’s naughty side.
John was unfailingly polite. His former student David Sharp gave an example in a 1977
letter to John:

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One day [in the early 1960s when you and I were working together], a
man came to see you. He had a ‘theory’ of something or other that he
wanted to explain. It became clear after about 30 seconds that the man
was a ‘crackpot.’ … As the discussion dragged on, I began to seethe with
impatience. … But not you. You treated the man with respect. … You met
his ideas head-on and quickly but kindly demonstrated the flaws in them.
… I’m sure that when the man left he was still convinced of the basic
correctness of his ‘theory.’ But he did acknowledge the flaws (which were
devastating) and I’m equally sure that he felt that he had been treated
fairly.

Unfailingly polite? Well, almost. On exceedingly rare occasions, when a special need
arose, John could be blunt. Dick Feynman described an example to me in the 1970s,
when we were both a bit inebriated at a party: “When I was his student, Wheeler was
sometimes too fast for me,” Feynman said. “One day we were working on a calculation
together. I could not see how he got from this point to the next. ‘Little steps for little
people,’ Wheeler said, as he spelled out for me the omitted steps.” This is the only time
I, Kip, ever heard any former student describe John behaving so impolitely. I can only
speculate
1. that Feynman had been displaying great brashness and arrogance and Wheeler felt he
needed to be shown that he was not yet a great master of all physics, and
2. that Wheeler knew Feynman could take such criticism without being seriously
damaged. Evidently, the lesson stuck indelibly; Feynman remembered it with chagrin
decades afterward.
In his later years, Wheeler developed a reputation for proposing weird, and seemingly
crazy ideas. One day in 1971, Wheeler, Feynman, and I had lunch together at the Burger
Continental near Caltech. Over Armenian food, Wheeler described to Feynman and me
his idea that the laws of physics are mutable: Those laws must have come into being in
our universe’s Big Bang birth, and surely there are other universes, each with its own set
of laws. “What principles determine which laws emerge in our universe and which in
another?” he asked. Feynman turned to me and said,
This guy sounds crazy. What people of your generation don’t know is
that he has always sounded crazy. But when I was his student [30 years
earlier], I discovered that, if you take one of his crazy ideas and you

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unwrap the layers of craziness one after another like lifting the layers off
an onion, at the heart of the idea you will often find a powerful kernel of
truth.”

Feynman then recalled Wheeler’s 1942 idea that positrons are electrons going backward
in time, and the importance of that idea in Feynman’s Nobel Prize-winning formulation
of quantum electrodynamics.3
Today string theorists are struggling to figure out what determines which of the plethora
of quantum vacua (and their associated physical laws) in the string-theory landscape
actually occurred in the birth of our universe, or in any other universe. This is a concrete
variant of Wheeler’s question about what principles determined which laws arose, a
variant informed by 47 intervening years of quantum gravity research; and it is an
example of Wheeler’s prescience—a prescience that is much more appreciated today than
in the prime of his career.
John was the principal mentor for roughly 50 PhD. dissertations, 50 undergraduate
senior theses, and 40 postdoctoral students.4 His mentoring techniques and effectiveness
were remarkable, and so I patterned many of my own techniques after his.
He was tremendously inspirational: In 1962, I had just arrived at Princeton as a graduate
student. My dream was to work on relativity with Professor Wheeler, so I knocked on his
door with trepidation. He greeted me with a warm smile, ushered me into his office, and
began immediately (as though I were an esteemed colleague, not a total novice) to discuss
the mysteries of the gravitational collapse of a star at the end of its life. I emerged an hour
later, a convert and disciple.5 Much of my research over the subsequent decade dealt with
gravitational collapse, the black holes it produces, and related topics.
John provided detailed guidance for beginning students. Daniel Holz, his last student,
wrote in a blog on the day of Wheeler’s death:6
[In 1990, as an undergraduate looking for a senior thesis project,] I
waltzed into Wheeler’s office and asked if he had any projects I could
work on. I staggered out of his office four hours later, laden with books, a
clearly defined project in my hands.

Robert Geroch (a PhD student of Wheeler’s in the mid 1960s) has described Wheeler’s
mentoring style with strong PhD students:7

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Wheeler had a global view. He forced you to look out and not be too
small. ‘If you want to know the answer to this,’ he would say, ‘let’s phone
Madam Choquet in Paris right now.’ ‘If you’re interested in topic X, then
we better fly in Roy Kerr from Texas to explain it to us.’ One comes to
graduate school with a kind of ‘backing-off’ attitude, an awe of the big
names. He was very good at breaking that.

Among the colleagues with whom Wheeler put Geroch in touch were Stephen Hawking
and Roger Penrose, and as a result, Geroch, as a student, became during that era perhaps
the third most influential person after them in applying techniques of differential
topology to the study of generic singularities in the structure of spacetime.
Bill Unruh (a Wheeler PhD. student in the early 1970s) recalls:8
I had just got started working on my first research problem and had a
few extremely vague ideas. I mentioned them to Wheeler one day, and
he said, ‘I’ve received this invitation to a workshop in Gwatt, Switzerland.
Would you like to go and present your results?’ I was torn because I didn’t
have any results to present. And then he said, ‘Here, I’ll write out this
telegram,’ and he wrote one saying, ‘Would you please invite Bill Unruh
to give a talk.’ He handed it to me and said, ‘Please phone this in to the
telegraph office.’ So I wandered around for two or three hours agonizing
over whether to send this telegram, because if I sent it, I was committed.
I finally did send it and then had three months to get some results worth
presenting.

John was driven by an intense desire to know how Nature works, at the deepest level. In
1932-1952, like most all physicists, he presumed that elementary particles are Nature’s
most fundamental building blocks, so he focused his research on particle physics and
nuclear physics, and in a related detour he devoted great ingenuity and energy to the
development of nuclear weapons. From 1952 to 1976, he focused on curved spacetime, as
embodied in Einstein’s general relativity and its quantization, as Nature’s more likely most
fundamental building block; and from 1976 onward he focused on quantum information
as the most likely foundation for all we see. In the remainder of this biography, I shall
describe, in each of these areas, some of John’s research and some inspirational ideas that
he fed to others.

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Nuclear and particle physics⁹

John entered Johns Hopkins University in 1927 at age 16, began research in his third
year, and, bypassing the bachelor’s degree, continued nonstop to a PhD. under Karl
Herzfeld in 1933. In John’s PhD. thesis, he applied the still rather new quantum theory
to the scattering and absorption of light by helium atoms. During his fifth year at
Hopkins, James Chadwick, in England, discovered the neutron, giving birth to nuclear
physics.
At NYU in John’s first postdoctoral year (1933–1934),
with his advisor Gregory Breit, he calculated the scattering
of photons off each other, a process not observed in the
laboratory until 63 years later, when intense enough lasers
became available. His second postdoctoral year (1934–
1935), in Copenhagen with Niels Bohr, was largely a
period for consolidating his understanding of physics and
developing his own viewpoints, very much influenced by
Bohr.
This led to nuclear physics as John’s prime focus at the
University of North Carolina (1935–1937). In a project
with Edward Teller (who in Copenhagen had become
John’s close friend), John pioneered the study of rota-
tional states of nuclei. Alone, he developed a model of
nuclei based on “resonating group structure” (later called
“clustering”) in which the wave function is built up of John Wheeler as a postdoc of Niels
components that describe the neutrons and protons as Bohr in Copenhagen, 1934. (Credit:
clustering into alpha particles and other tightly inter- AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives,
Wheeler Collection.)
acting groups. As a byproduct of this analysis he invented
the S-matrix (scattering matrix), which became a major
tool for nuclear and particle physics over subsequent decades. In North Carolina he also
embarked on mentoring PhD. students. His first was Katherine Way, who went on to an
eminent career in nuclear physics.
In December 1938, not long after John’s move to Princeton, Otto Hahn and Fritz
Strassmann in Germany bombarded uranium with slow neutrons, producing nuclear
fission (though they did not know what they had; it was Otto Frisch and Lise Meitner
who interpreted the data as fission products). Frisch told Bohr, who carried the news on

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a transatlantic ship to Princeton. There Bohr and Wheeler elaborated George Gamow’s
liquid-drop model of the nucleus and used it to develop the theory of nuclear fission, in
one of the most important papers of Wheeler’s career. From the Bohr-Wheeler theory
it was easily deduced that the ideal nuclei in which to trigger fission via slow-neutron
bombardment are uranium-235 (which was used, unknowingly, by Hahn and Strassman)
and plutonium-239—which was unknown at the time, as it has a small enough half-life
not to be found in Nature. Plutonium-239 became the foundation for nuclear reactors,
in which it is produced artificially in large quantities, and for the first atomic bomb (the
Trinity test).
World War II and the atomic bomb effort interrupted much of John’s career; see below.
Immediately after the war, impressed by the major discoveries about fundamental
particles that had come from cosmic-ray experiments at other institutions (particularly
Carl Anderson’s lab at Caltech), John proposed, created and led a cosmic-ray laboratory
at Princeton. He became enamored of the muon (which was cleanly delineated from the
pion, experimentally, only in 1947), because the muon’s lack of coupling to the strong
nuclear force made it much simpler to work with than most other particles. With the aid
of observations in his cosmic-ray lab and elsewhere, he gave strong evidence that in all
respects except mass, the muon’s properties are the same as those of an electron.
He focused on atoms in which an electron is replaced by a muon (mu-mesic, later
called mu-mesonic, atoms), finding them interesting not only in principle but because
the muon, with its much heavier mass, is more tightly bound to the nucleus than the
electron it replaces and so can probe nuclear properties much better. Accordingly, he
developed in detail the theory of mu-mesic atoms and linked the theory to experiment,
including observations, in his cosmic-ray laboratory by W. K. Chang, of the gamma-ray
cascade emitted as the muon in a mu-mesic atom drops from one energy level to another.
In 1949, with his student Jayme Tiomno, John identified the universality of the weak
interaction in which neutrons, muons, and electrons participate: That the same weak
coupling constant governs the beta decay of a neutron (to form a proton, electron, and
electron antineutrino); the beta decay of a muon (to form an electron, electron anti-
neutrino, and muon neutrino); and the charge exchange reaction in which a muon is
captured by an atomic nucleus and there combines with a proton to form a neutron and
muon neutrino. This universality was identified independently by Giampietro Puppi,
and a lovely triangle that displays this universality graphically—drawn by Tiomno and
Wheeler, but not by Puppi—wound up named the “Puppi triangle.”

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In the fall of 1949, following shell-model insights of Hans Jensen and Maria Goeppert-
Mayer, John realized that in big nuclei, a single nucleon, constrained by liquid-droplet
tension, could travel around the rest of the nucleus in a large orbit, deforming the
nucleus substantially. He inserted this idea and its quantitative analysis into the manu-
script of a paper on a broader topic that he was writing with Niels Bohr and David Hill.
Bohr, as was his wont, sat on the paper for a great many months, trying to perfect it,
and in the meantime John’s idea was discovered independently by James Rainwater at
Columbia University and led to Rainwater’s sharing a Nobel Prize. Of this, Wheeler has
written10
…I learned a lesson. When one discovers something significant, it is best
to publish it promptly and not wait to incorporate it into some grander
scheme. Waiting to assemble all the pieces might be all right for a philos-
opher, but it is not wise for a physicist.

But he did not blame Bohr, for whom he had great affection and reverence; not at all. He
just blamed himself.
By the early 1940s, John had formulated and embarked on his quest to understand
Nature at its deepest level. His initial hope for the fundamental building block of every-
thing was particles. For a short while he speculated that perhaps, somehow, everything
in the universe is made solely from electrons and positrons, but all he ever succeeded
in achieving in this direction was the prediction and theory of an almost endless family
of short-lived “atoms” built from them, which he called “polyelectrons.” Of these, the
simplest— positronium (one electron and one positron) and the positronium ion (two
electrons and one positron)—have been created and studied in the laboratory and
compared with his theory.
John had greater success in an effort, with Feynman, to remove fields entirely from classical
electrodynamics, making it a theory based solely on particles. They did this by writing the
direct action-at-a-distance Lienard-Weichert force of one charge particle on another as half
the retarded force plus half the advanced force. This is time-symmetric, and leads (i) to
no interaction of a particle with itself and thus no infinite self-energy to be renormalized;
and (ii) to the standard radiation reaction force, which arises, without any radiation field,
from the interaction of the accelerated particle with all the other charged particles in the
universe (which play the role of absorbers). The vision for such a field-free theory came
from Feynman; but the principal ideas for how to make it really work came from Wheeler,
as Feynman describes in great detail in his Nobel Prize lecture.3

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This field-free classical theory became a major foundation for Feynman’s formulation of
quantum electrodynamics, but not for Wheeler’s dream of a full particles-only formu-
lation of physics. There it was a dead end. A few years after its completion, Wheeler gave
up on his particles-only dream and switched to fields-only—in particular, the relativistic
gravitational field or spacetime curvature embodied in general relativity. To this I will
return after a diversion.
Nuclear weapons
Shortly after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, John plunged full-force into the
American effort to build an atomic bomb. In January 1942, he joined Arthur Compton’s
“Metallurgical Laboratory” at the University of Chicago to work on the world’s first
test reactor, designed to explore the production of plutonium-239 via a nuclear chain
reaction. Then in March 1943, Compton assigned him to be the project’s liaison scientist
to the DuPont Company’s project to design and then build the first large-scale plutoni-
um-production reactor at Hanford, Washington. John urged a conservative design that
would allow for the possibility that some then-unknown atomic nucleus with a very high
absorption cross-section for slow neutrons might be formed in the fissions, and thereby
poison the chain reaction — as indeed did happen.
On October 25, 1944, one month after the poisoning discovery, John’s brother Joe was
killed in military action in Italy. John, who had been very close to Joe, was devastated.
Thereafter he never forgave himself for failing to press to initiate the atomic bomb effort
a year or two earlier. That might, he reasoned, have resulted in a much earlier bomb
which might have ended the war before Joe and millions of others were killed. This
weighed heavily on John for the rest of his life and contributed substantially, I think, to
his political conservatism on issues of national defense.
After Joe’s death, John doubled down and worked harder than ever on the bomb effort.
When the bombs were ultimately dropped on Hiroshima and then Nagasaki with a
horrific loss of civilian life that ended the war, John had no misgivings, by contrast with
Robert Oppenheimer and many other physicist contributors to the bomb effort.
At the end of the war, John returned to fundamental physics, until the Soviet Union
tested its first atomic bomb, in August 1949. The reaction in America was panic, bomb
shelters, and atomic bomb drills, even in my little elementary school in rural Utah. The
Russian bomb test prompted Teller to urge a crash program to develop the hydrogen
bomb (H-bomb). Oppenheimer opposed it, John backed it, and President Truman

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ordered it to go forward. John joined Teller in Los Alamos to work on the bomb’s design.
A year later, when an innovation by Teller and Stanislaw Ulam made the H-bomb seem,
for the first time, truly feasible, John set up a satellite bomb-design effort at Princeton.11
He and his colleagues there worked quasi-independently of the other design effort in
Los Alamos (though with frequent communication)—a two-track approach also being
pursued by Soviet physicists.
John tried, and failed, to get eminent senior physicists to join the design effort, so he
assembled a group of graduate students and fresh postdocs to do the work under his
guidance. As described by Ken Ford, a member of his team, John “reduced what was
known or guessed about reaction rates and the properties of matter in extremis to a set of
coupled differential equations of such simplicity that they could be handled numerically
on a then-available computer—the National Bureau of Standards SEAC machine—
whose total memory capacity was less than 3 kilobytes.” John’s students and postdocs
programmed the computer to model, with these equations, the first planned test of the
Teller-Ulam idea. (Their earlier, promising numerical results, achieved on an even more
primitive computer, played an important role in June 1951, in convincing the Atomic
Energy Commission’s General Advisory Committee to recommend moving forward.) In
1952, with the help of SEAC, John’s group predicted to within 30% the yield of that first
thermonuclear test explosion, code named Mike.
In the Soviet Union, the Teller-Ulam idea was invented independently by Andrei
Sakharov and Yakov Borisovich Zel’dovich and led to a Soviet H-bomb. A few years later,
Wheeler, Sakharov, and Zel’dovich all embarked on research in relativistic astrophysics,
and in 1968 I found myself in a hotel room with the three of them, at a relativity
conference in Tbilisi, Georgia, USSR. It was remarkable there to see the camaraderie and
deep mutual respect of these three “cold war” physicists for each other.
General relativity and quantum gravity
In 1952, a few months before the Mike thermonuclear test, John saw his weapons work
nearing an end, and so arranged to teach a full-year course on relativity. It was the first
relativity course offered at Princeton since 1941—an indication of the extent to which
relativity, in that era of rich nuclear physics, had become a backwater. John viewed rela-
tivity as a subject ripe for exploration and great discoveries, a subject “too important to
be left to the mathematicians.” And maybe, just maybe, curved spacetime would turn
out to be the ultimate foundation for everything. Hence his eagerness to teach a relativity
course: “If you want to learn, teach” he often said.

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Over the next few years, John developed his own unique viewpoint on relativity, a
viewpoint in which the geometry of curved spacetime was central: a geometry visu-
alized in pictures of curved surfaces and bending world lines, a geometry that became
a foundation for physical intuition. Charles Misner and I, as John’s students, learned
that viewpoint from him, and in 1973 we three codified it in our textbook Gravitation.
Almost simultaneously, Steven Weinberg codified a field-theoretic viewpoint on general
relativity in his textbook Gravitation and Cosmology. Wheeler’s geometric viewpoint came
to dominate research on classical general relativity, while Weinberg’s field-theoretic view-
point has dominated most modern cosmology research.
By 1956, John had identified a plethora of fascinating research projects in relativity, and
his garden of ideas and flowering projects grew rapidly over the subsequent years, as
did his entourage of students, postdocs, and senior colleagues. One can get some sense
of the richness of John’s ideas from his 1963 lectures at a physics summer school in Les
Houches, France.12

John Wheeler giving an inspirational lecture to colleagues at a conference at the Institute of

Astronomy in Cambridge, England, in summer 1971. John’s style was to cover a huge black-
board with colored chalk drawings before the lecture, then work his way through them as the
lecture progressed. (Credit: Kip Thorne.)

By the early 1970s, John’s Princeton group had grown to about 15 (unusually large for a
theory group in those days), and as Bill Unruh recalls, “Wheeler himself was the source
of the key initial ideas for the research of most everyone in the group.” And by the early

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1970s, relativity had become a major branch of physics and was entering a golden age,
thanks in considerable measure to the theoretical research of John and his intellectual
progeny, and thanks to observational discoveries of quasars, pulsars, and compact X-ray
sources (all energized by black holes or neutron stars) and the discovery of the cosmic
background radiation from the Big Bang.
John’s interest in relativity was triggered in January 1952, when he studied the 1938–
1939 work of Robert Oppenheimer and student George Volkoff on neutron stars,
and also the work of Oppenheimer and student Hartland Snyder on the collapse of a
sufficiently massive star—which (they found) leads the star to “cut itself off from the rest
of the universe” and form an infinite-density singularity at its center, i.e. leads it to form
what John, seventeen years later, would dub a “black hole”. So it was natural that some of
John’s earliest projects built on Oppenheimer’s work.
With his student Kent Harrison and postdoc Masami Wakano, John asked, “What is the
endpoint of thermonuclear evolution for stars of various masses?” They catalogued the
entire range of absolute-endpoint objects—a continuous family with increasing central
density, from cold white dwarfs made of iron 56 with central densities up to
2.5 x 108 g/cm3, through unstable objects of intermediate densities, to neutron stars
with densities 3 x 1013 to 6 x 1015 g/cm3, and onward into unstable objects with densities
increasing toward infinity. This helped solidify the conclusion that sufficiently massive
stars (or, as John liked to think of it, stars containing a sufficiently large number of
baryons) must undergo the kind of gravitational collapse that Oppenheimer and Snyder
had described mathematically.
John was highly skeptical of the Oppenheimer-Snyder conclusions about the collapse.
He focused particularly on the singularity (with infinite density and infinite curvature
of spacetime) predicted to form deep inside the cut-off sphere (inside what today we call
the event horizon). There, he argued, the laws of classical general relativity must break
down, and be replaced by laws of quantum gravity that result from “a fiery marriage” of
general relativity with quantum theory. This singularity and the “issue of the final state”
of massive stars that are prone to collapse to form it, became a major focus of his research
and that of his students.
In June 1958, at a Solvay Congress,13 John rejected the predicted singularity as physically
unreasonable and speculated about the collapse’s true final state: “[N]o escape is apparent
except to assume that the nucleons at the center of a highly compressed mass [where the

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singularity is trying to form] must necessarily dissolve away into radiation … at such a
rate or in such numbers as to keep the total number of nucleons from exceeding a certain
critical number [so the final state can be a neutron star].” Oppenheimer, who was present
in the audience, was unpersuaded. And a few years later, with the help of David Sharp,
I myself talked John out of including this seemingly outrageous speculation in a book
that I was coauthoring with John,14 though he continued to espouse his speculation
elsewhere.
Then, a few years after that, Stephen Hawking discovered Hawking Radiation from
black holes — a form of radiation very much like John’s speculation. When Hawking
and John’s former postdoctoral student James Hartle devised a derivation of Hawking
radiation in which the singularity inside the collapsing star participates in producing the
radiation in a manner somewhat similar to John’s speculation,15 I regretted my efforts to
suppress John’s wild idea, and came to appreciate his prescience.
By 1962, John’s entourage had elucidated in crystal clear form what was going on in the
Oppenheimer-Snyder calculation—that a horizon forms at the cutoff sphere, hiding the
interior from view; and in 1968 John introduced the name black hole to describe the
resulting object. But for John the issue of the final state inside the horizon, —the singu-
larity—remained the most important focus, motivating much of his subsequent work on
quantum gravity; see below.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, a major focus for John’s entourage and others was the
physics of black holes. It was particularly important to know whether black holes are
stable against small perturbations. For that we all looked back to a pioneering, 1957
stability analysis by John and his student Tullio Regge. In 1957 the horizon was not
understood, so it was not fully clear what inner boundary conditions Regge and Wheeler
should impose on their equations. Once that was sorted out, in the late 1960s, Charles
Misner’s student C. V. Vishveshwara was quickly able to complete the Regge-Wheeler
analysis and prove that nonrotating black holes are stable. The stability of spinning black
holes soon followed, proved by my own students Saul Teukolsky and Bill Press, in an
analysis patterned after Regge and Wheeler.
In 1970, Stephen Hawking deduced that, in any process, including highly dynamical
ones, the sum of the surface areas of all interacting black holes must increase. Hawking
was well aware that this made a black hole’s surface area analogous to entropy, but he was
highly skeptical that there was any connection. John’s graduate student Jacob Bekenstein,
by contrast, was quite sure that a black hole’s surface area is its entropy in disguise, and

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he argued vigorously and semi-quantitatively for this, with John’s strong backing. “It’s
just crazy enough to be right,” John said. (John liked to quote Gertrude Stein’s remark,
“It looks strange and it looks strange, and it looks very strange, and then suddenly it does
not look strange at all, and you cannot understand what made it look strange in the first
place.”) When Hawking used quantum theory to discover that black holes can radiate, he
reversed himself, embraced the “Bekenstein entropy” of a black hole, and made under-
standing it in depth a major focus of his own research.
Among John’s entourage in the mid-1950s was a young electrical engineer named Joseph
(Joe) Weber, who had recently been hired as a faculty member at the University of
Maryland, College Park. John encouraged Joe’s interest in relativity, and together they
explored, mathematically, exact solutions of Einstein’s equations for cylindrical grav-
itational waves, showing that such waves are physical phenomena, not mere figments
of the mathematics. (There was much skepticism of their physical reality at that time.)
This project with John played a major role in Weber’s embarking on his experimental
search for gravitational waves from the astrophysical universe, a quest that John strongly
encouraged, as he would later encourage me and my LIGO colleagues in our follow-on,
and ultimately successful, quest.
Although John’s relativity research focused on theory, he paid close attention to obser-
vations and experiment. In 1966, when asked to write a review article on the theory of
neutron stars (which had never yet been seen), he chose to include in it a speculation
on how they might first be discovered. “Energy of rotation [of a central neutron star]
appears not yet to have been investigated as a source of power [for the Crab nebula],” he
wrote. “Presumably this mechanism can only be effective—if then—when the magnetic
field of the residual neutron star is well coupled to the surrounding ion clouds.”16 This
and a similar but more detailed argument by Franco Pacini a year later17 were the closest
anyone ever came, before the 1967 discovery of pulsars, to the correct explanation of
what powers the Crab nebula.
Early in his study of general relativity, John became enthusiastic about what he called
geometrodynamics: the dynamics of the geometry of spacetime—especially in vacuum,
where there is no matter present to complicate things.
John’s first examples of geometrodynamics were toroidal and spherical configurations of
electromagnetic waves that are held together (confined) by the gravitational pull and
spacetime curvature of the waves’ energy. He called these geons, and introduced into
general relativity a two-lengthscale expansion and self-consistent-field approximation

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by which to analyze them. John’s PhD. student Dieter Brill and Brill’s undergraduate
student James Hartle together used these techniques to analyze gravitational geons, in
which the electromagnetic waves are replaced by gravitational waves, so the entire geon is
an (approximate) solution of the vacuum Einstein equations: vacuum geometrodynamics.
John hoped that fundamental particles such as the proton might turn out to be quan-
tum-gravity analogs of these geons, but he never made any progress in that direction.
And his classical geons turned out to be unstable, both to leakage of the waves out of the
entity and to a collective radial mode of motion. However, the mathematical techniques
that John and then Brill and Hartle introduced to analyze geons a decade later in the
hands of Misner’s student Richard Isaacson, produced a rigorous definition of the energy
and momentum carried by generic gravitational waves and a rigorous way to analyze the
waves’ production of and interaction with generic large-scale spacetime curvature. This is
one example of the productive chains of influence that flowed from John.
Another example is a clever analysis, carried out in 1957 by John and his student Richard
Lindquist, of a vacuum-geometrodynamic, closed universe, one made of a large number
of black holes that interact with each other gravitationally. The dynamics of the universe’s
expansion and recontraction, Lindquist and Wheeler found, is nearly the same as that
of a Friedman model universe that is filled with dust rather than black holes. The differ-
ences, they deduced, become greater as the number of black holes goes down.
To me this is particularly interesting as John’s first attempt to explore the motion of
a small, strongly gravitating body (the black hole) in a large-scale gravitational field
(spacetime curvature). In John’s next iteration, with his student Fred Manasse (1963) and
with advice from Misner, John introduced matched asymptotic expansions into general
relativity to achieve higher rigor and better accuracy, and 20 years later, James Hartle and
I (both former Wheeler students), used these same techniques to explore how rotation
and non-sphericities of compact bodies (including spinning black holes), when coupled
to spacetime curvature, modify the bodies’ motion and precession.
One more example of John’s chain of influence is numerical relativity.18 John recog-
nized from the outset that exploring generic geometrodynamics analytically would be
exceedingly hard and most likely impossible. Einstein’s equations are too nonlinear. So,
with his team’s numerical simulations of the first thermonuclear test explosion recently
completed, John urged his entourage to embark on analogous numerical simulations of
geometrodynamics.

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In 1958, John triggered Richard Arnowitt (of Syracuse) and Stanley Deser (Harvard) to
take on Misner as a collaborator in creating a new formulation of Einstein’s equations,
one ideally suited for numerical relativity. This ADM formulation (building on earlier
spin-2 field theory work of Arnowitt and Deser) split 4-dimensional spacetime into space
plus time, and it split the full nonlinear Einstein equations into initial-value (constraint)
equations plus dynamical equations.
In 1960, Misner solved the ADM constraint equations to obtain a mathematical
description of two black holes that are momentarily at rest with respect to each other,
and then Lindquist, together with computational scientist Susan Hahn at IBM, solved
the ADM evolution equations numerically and thereby watched the black holes fall
toward each other. Unfortunately, the holes’ actual collision was beyond the capability of
the Hahn-Lindquist computer and code. It was not fully explored numerically until 20
years later, by Larry Smarr and Kenneth Eppley.
Today, numerical relativity in the hands of a younger generation is crucial for analyzing
the data from LIGO’s gravitational-wave detectors, and is being used to explore generic
geometrodynamics,19 fulfilling John’s original, now 60-year-old vision.
John and his entourage were driven into early explorations of quantum gravity by both
the issue of the final state (the singularity inside black holes), and John’s fixation on the
deepest foundations of physics.
John’s first venture into quantum gravity was a paper he published in 1957, titled
“Quantum Geometrodynamics,”20 in which he made educated guesses as to what
physical phenomena might result from the fiery marriage of general relativity with
quantum theory. Most importantly, he identified the “Planck length” as the characteristic
length scale for quantum-gravity effects, and he argued that on this length scale space
should exhibit “quantum foam,” a foam of randomly fluctuating curvature and topology,
including microscopic “wormholes”—handles in the structure of space first described
classically by Hermann Weyl in 1924 and explored in depth by John and his entourage
in the 1950s and early 1960s.
In the early 1960s, when I was John’s graduate student, Bryce DeWitt often visited
Princeton from North Carolina, for long discussions with John about quantum gravity.
I sat in on these discussions, only half understanding, as much went over my head. The
discussions led to their formulating together the basic ideas for a quantum theory of
gravity: a wave function defined on a superspace of spacelike, 3-dimensional geometries;

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and an equation—since named the Wheeler-DeWitt equation—that governed that wave

function. DeWitt took off from there in developing the theory in great detail.21 Hawking
and others have used this theory in their searches for insights into quantum gravity; but,
of course, it is only one among several approaches to quantum gravity that look prom-
ising today.
Quantum information
With his move to Texas in 1976, John transitioned from relativity as his central focus to
the role of measurement in quantum physics — an ancient subject on which Bohr and
Einstein had jousted in the 1930s, but one which had become an extreme backwater by
1976. John’s interest in quantum measurement dated back to his 1934-–1935 postdoc-
toral year with Bohr, but only upon arriving at Texas did he plunge into it.
John assembled around himself in Texas an entourage of students, postdocs, and faculty
members much like his previous relativity entourage at Princeton. He jump-started this
entourage with a two-year-long course on quantum measurement, in which they studied
a wide range of writings of previous generations. Wojciech Zurek, a graduate student
in the entourage, recalls that “the class often turned into a seminar, where visitors and
students reported their research or interesting new papers.” A collection of readings from
that class, published by Wheeler and Zurek,22 became a resource for others, as Wheeler’s
group and colleagues elsewhere began to revitalize research on quantum measurement
and related areas of quantum physics, transforming them into the modern field of
“quantum information.”
Zurek, in retrospect, assesses John’s influence thus:23
Looking back on Wheeler’s ten years at Texas, many quantum information
scientists now regard him, along with IBM’s Rolf Landauer, as a grand-
father of their field. That, however, was not because Wheeler produced
seminal research papers on quantum information. He did not—with one
major exception, his delayed-choice experiment. Rather, his role was to
inspire by asking deep questions from a radical conservative viewpoint
and, through his questions, to stimulate others’ research and discovery.

Among the members of John’s entourage whom he so stimulated were Zurek and
graduate student William Wooters who together, in 1982, under John’s influence, formu-
lated and proved the theorem that an unknown (unmeasured) quantum state cannot be
cloned. A third was postdoc David Deutsch, who, after moving to Oxford, formulated

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and proved in 1985 the possibility of a universal quantum computer (a quantum Turing
machine): one that can simulate any other quantum computer with at most a polynomial
slowdown. A fourth was Texas assistant professor (1979–1985) Jeff Kimble, who carried
out fundamental experiments in quantum optics that produced and measured new
nonclassical states of light such as photon anti-bunched states and squeezed states. Later,
at Caltech, Kimble made crucial contributions to quantum non-demolition technology
for LIGO’s gravitational wave detectors.
John’s views on quantum measurement were an elaboration of those of Bohr, as
embodied in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. The central facet of
an (ideal) quantum measurement, John maintained, is the “collapse of uncertainty into
certainty,” as embodied in the collapse of the wave function. He probed this collapse
conceptually with his “delayed choice experiment,” a thought experiment in which the
experimenter’s choice of what to measure can be regarded as influencing the past history
of the measured system—and even converting it from being uncertain in the quantum
sense to being definite in the classical sense.
John began with a standard “Mach-Zender” interference experiment, though with single
photons: The wave-packet quantum state of a single photon is split in two by one beam
splitter, and then recombined by another, and then the photon is detected (measured) by
a photodetector at one or the other output port of the second splitter. If the path lengths
between splitters are equal and the second splitter is present, then interference of the
recombining wave packets causes every photon to be detected at just one output port.
We know, then, that the photon emerging from the first splitter went down both paths
and interfered to make one output port always light up and the other always remain
dark.
If, on the other hand, the second splitter is absent, then the measured photons wind up
equally distributed between the two ports, telling us that each of the photons has made
a random choice of which path to go down, and went down solely that one: the unique
path that led it to the output port where it was detected. The choice of what to measure
(of whether to include the second splitter or not) determined which path(s) the photon
followed: both, or just one.
John turned this into a “delayed choice” experiment by (conceptually) inserting or
removing the second splitter after the wave packet passed through the first splitter. The
choice of measurement (second splitter or no second splitter) could then be regarded as
reaching into the past and making definite which path(s) the photon has followed: one or

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both. Several years after John conceived this thought experiment, William Wickes, Caroll
Alley, and Oleg Jakubowicz actually carried it out at the University of Maryland, getting
precisely the result that John knew they would.24
This thought experiment led John to speculate that the universe might be “a self- excited
circuit” —a system whose existence and history are determined by measurements, many
of them made long after it came into existence. (John hastened to add that measurements
in this, and in Bohr’s, sense do not require intelligent life. Each measurement “is an
irreversible act in which uncertainty collapses to certainty …, some event in the classical
world [such as] the click of a counter, the activation of an optic nerve in someone’s eye or
just the coalescence of a glob of matter triggered by a quantum event.”)
John’s self-excited-circuit idea in turn led him to speculate that information theory is
the basis of existence: “Trying to wrap my brain around this idea,…, I came up with the
phrase ‘it from bit.’ The universe and all that it contains (‘it’) may arise from the myriad
yes-no choices of measurement (the ‘bits’) [that occur during the life of the universe].”
As crazy as this may sound, many quantum-information scientists think it respectable. In
John’s famous words, it just might be “crazy enough to be right.”
Family
John describes the first time he noticed Janette Hegner, at a dance in Baltimore in spring
1933:
She looked me straight in the eye. No fluttering eyelashes for Janette.
… I was attracted to her quick wit, her obvious intelligence, and her
common-sense approach to matters we talked about.10

Later, after just three dates, they became engaged, but they delayed marriage until John
returned from his postdoctoral year with Bohr in Copenhagen.
Their marriage was a true partnership, as is clear from John’s autobiography,10 and it lasted
robustly for the rest of their lives. Janette’s influence on John was profound, as was his on her.
Most evenings, in bed, they would read to each other from a book they had jointly chosen.
And together they provided a warm and welcoming home environment for students and
visiting physicists, with wonderful meals cooked by Janette.
John, Janette, and their three children Letitia, James, and Alison were a tight-knit traditional
family. John escaped from Princeton frequently during his career, to far-off places where he

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could hide and think or interact fruitfully with colleagues, and his family often went with
him—for example, seven months in France in 1949–1950; and nine months in Leiden, The
Netherlands in 1956. Those sojourns were crucial opportunities for John to develop fresh
viewpoints and directions in research, or sometimes simply to complete long-delayed projects.

Upper left: John and Janette in 1984 (©1984 Beverly White Spicer). Lower left: High
Island (credit: photo by Jack Lane, courtesy James Wheeler). Right: Invitation to John’s
80th birthday celebration on High Island, with fireworks.

In 1957, John and Janette bought half of High Island, a 66-acre island in Maine
connected to the mainland by a causeway and road. Thereafter they spent most summers
there, with physics students and colleagues visiting frequently for discussions or collabo-
rative work. Janette and John welcomed my wife Linda and me, and our baby daughter
Kares, to stay in a cottage on their island for much of the summer of 1964, as John and
I wrote a thin little book on Gravitation Theory and Gravitational Collapse. Janette and
John were wonderful hosts.

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Five years later, Charlie Misner and his wife Susanne had built a home on the Maine
coast near High Island, so Linda and I and our two children rented a nearby cottage for
a summer of intense writing on our textbook Gravitation—a collaboration that Johnny,
Charlie, and I treasured. When the book was finished, John gave Janette, Susanne, and
Linda each a gorgeous, large, silver and turquoise pin with an icon of High Island on
it, as a memento of their contributions to our idyllic summer months together, with
Johnny, Charlie, and me largely sequestered and writing.
In the 1990s and 2000s, with John in (supposed) retirement, he and Janette continued
their summer stays in High Island. The rest of the year they lived in a suburb of
Princeton, where John continued to go into the office frequently, to interact with phys-
icist colleagues and students.

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Acknowledgments
In writing this biographical memoir, I have relied heavily on: articles about John in
Physics Today published soon after his death, that were written by Ken Ford;9 Terry
Christensen;4 and Charles Misner, Wojciech Zurek, and me;2 on materials that the five
of us collected in preparation for those writings; and on John Wheeler’s autobiography,10
coauthored with Ken Ford. I thank Ken, Terry, Charles and Wojciech for their large
contributions to this memoir, via these materials. And I also thank Ken, and John’s son
and daughter James Wheeler and Alison Lahnston for helpful comments and suggestions
on this memoir.

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NOTES
1 This memoir is also being published in the Biographical Memoir Series of the Royal Society.
2 For a much longer list, see Misner, C. W., K. S. Thorne, and W. H. Zurek. 2009. John
Wheeler, relativity, and quantum information. Physics Today 62(4):40–46.
3 For considerable detail about John’s huge impact on Richard Feynman’s Nobel Prize research,
see Feynman’s Nobel Prize lecture: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1965/feynman/
lecture/
4 Christensen, T. M. 2009. John Wheeler’s mentorship: An enduring legacy. Physics Today
62(4):55–59.
5 I describe this first meeting with Wheeler in greater detail, and much more about Wheeler’s
mentoring, in my 1993 book, Black Holes and Time Warps. New York: Norton.
6 Holz, D. Discover magazine blog on the day that Wheeler died.
http:// blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/04/13/goodby
7 Geroch, R. Recorded interview with K. S. Thorne in April 1982. Available in the Caltech
Archives, Pasadena, CA.
8 Unruh, W. Recorded interview with K. S. Thorne in December 1980. Available in the Caltech
Archives, Pasadena, CA.
9 For greater detail on this period of Wheeler’s career, see Ford, K. 2009. John Wheeler’s work
on particles, nuclei, and weapons. Physics Today 62(4):29–33. See also Wheeler’s own 1979
autobiographical document: Some men and moments in the history of nuclear physics:
The interplay of colleagues and motivations. In Nuclear physics in retrospect: Proceedings of
a symposium on the 1930s. Edited by R. H. Stuewer. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 217–284.
10 John Wheeler’s autobiography: Wheeler, J. A., with K. Ford. 1998. Geons, black holes and
quantum foam: A life in physics. New York: Norton.
11 For a detailed history of John’s role and that of his team at Princeton, see a recent book by
John’s former student Ken Ford, who was a member his team: Ford, K. 2015. Building the
H-bomb: A personal history. Singapore: World Scientific.
12 Wheeler, J. A. 1964. Geometrodynamics and the issue of the final state. In Relativity, groups,
and topology, edited by C. DeWitt and B. DeWitt. New York: Gordon and Breach, 317–522.
13 Harrison, B. K., M. Wakano, and J. A. Wheeler. 1958. Matter-energy at high density: End
point of thermonuclear evolution. In La Structure et l’Evolution de l’Univers, Onzieme
Conseil de Physique Solvay. Brussels: Editions R. Stoops,124–148.

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14 Harrison, B. K., M. Wakano, K. S. Thorne, and J. A. Wheeler. 1965. Gravitation theory and
gravitational collapse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
15 Hartle, J. B., and S. W. Hawking. 1976. Path-integral derivation of black-hole radiance.
Phys. Rev. D 13:2188–2203.
16 Wheeler, J. A. 1966. Superdense stars. Ann. Rev. Astron. Astroph. 4:393–432.
17 Pacini, F. Energy emission from a neutron star. Nature. 216:567-568 (1967)
18 For a brief history with references, from Wheeler to today, see Thorne, K. S. 2018. Nobel
lecture: LIGO and gravitational waves III. Annalen der Physik 530:1800350.
19 See, for example, Scheel, M., and K. S. Thorne. 2014. Geometrodynamics: The nonlinear
dynamics of curved spacetime. Physics Uspekhi. 57:342–351.
20 Wheeler, J. A. 1957. Quantum geometrodynamics. Annals of Physics 2:604–614.
21 DeWitt, B. S. Quantum theory of gravity. I. The canonical theory. Phys. Rev. 160, 1113–1148.
22 Wheeler, J. A., and W. H. Zurek. 1983. Quantum theory and measurement. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
23 In Reference 2.
24 Wickes, W. C., C. O. Alley, and O. Jakubowicz, 1983. A delayed-choice quantum-mechanics
experiment. In Ref. 22, 457–464.

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1938 With E. Teller. On the rotation of the atomic nucleus. Phys. Rev. 53:778–789.

1939 With N. Bohr. The mechanism of nuclear fission. Phys. Rev. 56:426–450.

1945 With R. P. Feynman. Interaction with the absorber as the mechanism of radiation. Rev.
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1946 Polyelectrons. Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. 48:219–238.

1949 Some consequences of the electromagnetic interaction between μ-mesons and nuclei. Rev.
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With J. Tiomno. Charge exchange reaction of the μ meson with the nucleus. Rev. Mod.
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1955 Geons. Phys. Rev. 97:511–536.

1957 On the nature of quantum geometrodynamics. Ann. Phys. 2:604–614.

With T. Regge. Stability of a Schwarzschild singularity. Phys. Rev. 108:1063–1069.

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1958 With B. K. Harrison and M. Wakano. Matter-energy at high density: End point of ther-
monuclear evolution. In La structure et l’evolution de l’univers, Proceedings of eleventh
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1960 Neutrinos, gravitation, and geometry. In Rendiconti della scuola internazionale di fisica
“Enrico Fermi,” XI Corso. Bologna: Zanichelli.

1962 Geometrodynamics. New York: Academic Press.

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1964 Geometrodynamics and the issue of the final state. In Relativity, groups, and topology,
edited by C. DeWitt and B. DeWitt. New York: Gordon and Breach.

The superdense star and the critical nucleon number. In Gravitation and relativity, edited
by H.-Y. Chiu and W. F. Hoffman. New York: Benjamin.

1965 With B. K. Harrison, M. Wakano, and K. S. Thorne. Gravitation theory and gravitational
collapse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

1966 With E. F. Taylor. Spacetime physics. San Francisco: Freeman.

Superdense stars. Ann. rev. astron. astroph. 4:393–432.

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1973 With C. W. Misner and K. S. Thorne. Gravitation. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.

1979 The quantum and the universe. In Relativity, quanta, and cosmology, Vol. II, edited by
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Frontiers of time. Amsterdam: North Holland.

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by Roger H. Stuewer. pp. 217–284. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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With D. Holz. Retro-MACHOs: TT in the sky? Astrophys. J. 578:330–334.

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Published since 1877, Biographical Memoirs are brief biographies of deceased National Academy
of Sciences members, written by those who knew them or their work. These biographies provide
personal and scholarly views of America’s most distinguished researchers and a biographical history
of U.S. science. Biographical Memoirs are freely available online at www.nasonline.org/memoirs.

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