Halpern Paul. The Quantum Labyrinth: How Richard Feynman and John Wheeler Revolutionized Time and Reality

Basic Books, 2017. — 336 p.The story of the unlikely friendship between the two physicists who fundamentally recast the notion of time and history.In 1939, Richard Feynman, a brilliant graduate of MIT, arrived in John Wheeler's Princeton office to report for duty as his teaching assistant. A lifelong friendship and enormously productive collaboration was born, despite sharp differences in personality. The soft-spoken Wheeler, though conservative in appearance, was a raging nonconformist full of wild ideas about the universe. The boisterous Feynman was a cautious physicist who believed only what could be tested. Yet they were complementary spirits. Their collaboration led to a complete rethinking of the nature of time and reality. It enabled Feynman to show how quantum reality is a combination of alternative, contradictory possibilities, and inspired Wheeler to develop his landmark concept of wormholes, portals to the future and past. Together, Feynman and Wheeler made sure that quantum physics would never be the same again.Paul Halpern is a professor of physics at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, and the author of fifteen popular science books, most recently "Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat". He is also a Fellow of the American Physical Society.Introduction: A Revolution in Time
Wheeler’s WatchThe Only Particle in the Universe
All the Roads Not to Paradise
The Hidden Paths of Ghosts
The Island and the Mountains: Mapping the Particle Landscape
Life as an Amoeba in the Foamy Sea of Possibilities
Time’s Arrow and the Mysterious Mr. X
Minds, Machines and the Cosmos
The Way of the Labyrinth
Epilogue: Encounters with Wheeler
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Paul Halpern
Further Reading
Notes
Index