Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Foreword
- Editors' preface
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Part I An overview of the contributions of John Archibald Wheeler
- Part II An historian's tribute to John Archibald Wheeler and scientific speculation through the ages
- Part III Quantum reality: theory
- Part IV Quantum reality: experiment
- Part V Big questions in cosmology
- Part VI Emergence, life, and related topics
- Appendix A Science and Ultimate Reality Program Committees
- Appendix B Young Researchers Competition in honor of John Archibald Wheeler for physics graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and young faculty
- Index
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 March 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Foreword
- Editors' preface
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Part I An overview of the contributions of John Archibald Wheeler
- Part II An historian's tribute to John Archibald Wheeler and scientific speculation through the ages
- Part III Quantum reality: theory
- Part IV Quantum reality: experiment
- Part V Big questions in cosmology
- Part VI Emergence, life, and related topics
- Appendix A Science and Ultimate Reality Program Committees
- Appendix B Young Researchers Competition in honor of John Archibald Wheeler for physics graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and young faculty
- Index
Summary
My first encounter with John Archibald Wheeler was in the fall of 1945 in the reading room of the Science Library in London, a warm and comfortable place where anyone could walk in off the street to escape from rain and fog or to browse at leisure in scientific books and journals. I had just been released from war service and was eager to get back into science. I found the classic paper of Bohr and Wheeler, “The mechanism of nuclear fission,” in volume 56 of the Physical Review, pages 426–450. It was published on September 1, 1939, the day on which Hitler's armies marched into Poland and the Second World War began. Bohr and Wheeler wrote the paper in Princeton, where Bohr was visiting in the spring of 1939, a few months after the discovery of fission. The paper is a masterpiece of clear thinking and lucid writing. It reveals, at the center of the mystery of fission, a tiny world where everything can be calculated and everything understood. The tiny world is a nucleus of uranium 236, formed when a neutron is freshly captured by a nucleus of uranium 235.
The uranium 236 nucleus sits precisely on the border between classical and quantum physics. Seen from the classical point of view, it is a liquid drop composed of a positively charged fluid. The electrostatic force that is trying to split it apart is balanced by the nuclear surface tension that is holding it together.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Science and Ultimate RealityQuantum Theory, Cosmology, and Complexity, pp. xvii - xixPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004