John Archibald Wheeler: Is it crazy enough to be true? 3-1-12

John Archibald Wheeler (July 9, 1911 – April 13, 2008) was an American theoretical physicist who was largely responsible for reviving interest in general relativity in the United States after World War II. Wheeler also worked with Niels Bohr in explaining the basic principles behind nuclear fission....

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Ulla Mattfolk, John Nuck and 2 others like this.
- Ulla Mattfolk During the 1950s, Wheeler formulated geometrodynamics, a program of physical and ontological reduction of every physical phenomenon, such as gravitation and electromagnetism, to the geometrical properties of a curved space-time. Aiming at a systematical identification of matter with space, geometrodynamics was often characterized as a continuation of the philosophy of nature as conceived by Descartes and Spinoza. Wheeler's geometrodynamics, however, failed to explain some important physical phenomena, such as the existence of fermions (electrons, muons, etc.) or that of gravitational singularities. Wheeler therefore abandoned his theory as somewhat fruitless during the early 1970s.
  
  Maybe he used the wrong concept for the unification? Why are forces qubits? Behind a force is a particle!
  12 hours ago ·
- Mollyann Wingerter In classical physics a bit is information. In quantum physics information is a qu-bit. In a quantum computer, a quantum logic gate processes both up and down or zero and one bits at a time. This leads to increase in processiing power provided it does not effect the system. In a qubit all directions are possible because it is a particle that is behind it therefore it has the ability to exist as a superposition of different states.
  8 hours ago ·
- Michael McNeil Geometrodynamics is simply another name for general relativity. See, e.g., Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler's massive tome Gravitation from the 70's, where the two terms are used interchangeably.
  7 hours ago ·
- Leonardo Varesi and other attempts to unify the gravitation with Maxwell field as a 5-dimensional Kaluza-Klein, a unified field theory of Einstein........
  2 hours ago ·
- Jack Sarfatti Mollyane is correct. A+ :-)
  4 minutes ago ·
- Jack Sarfatti Wheeler's GMD is based on GR of course, but goes beyond Einstein's 1916 version as Ulla correctly descirbes above. Of course Wheeler was with Einstein at Princeton and Einstein knew what Wheeler was doing.
  2 minutes ago ·
- Jack Sarfatti Yes, GMD was a failed program as Ulla says, though parts of it may rise again, but of course, with quantum theory in Bohm's ontological interpretation and Abdus Salam's strong short-range Yukawa f-gravity that has reappeared in the extra-space dimensions of string theory.
  a few seconds ago ·