Geons, Black Holes & Quantum Foam (book review)
Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics by John Archibald Wheeler
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
An interesting romp through the physics of the 20th Century. John Wheeler was involved with many of the ideas and, it seems, almost all of the major figures who turned our traditional view of the world upside down. If one looked solely at the physics parts of his memoir, you’d walk away happy with a lay understanding of some very exciting work. The book is worth the read just for this tour de force through non-classical physics.
I felt that the book could have undergone another round of editing. The narrative jumps back and forth through time. That could be okay if he focused on one topic and went through all the times it cropped up, then set the clock back to discuss another topic. He’s in and out, more like one would get if you were at a cocktail party and kept picking up the conversation with him as you rotated throughout the various guests. Exciting conversation, yes, but hard to keep up at times.
While this isn’t a comment on the book, but more the man, I found myself repeatedly “yelling” at the book about his politics. It seems he was an adherent of the “my country, right or wrong, my country” philosophy. I didn’t see any introspection about his nuclear weapons work both during World War II and his work on the much more devastating hydrogen bomb during peacetime. I saw much more reflection from Oppenheimer, Einstein and Bethe. I think he missed President Eisenhower’s speech on the rise of the military-industrial complex.
Wheeler never explores the impact of his weapons work on others. He ignores the rest of the world, focusing solely on Europe, when he sees vindication of his weapon’s work by the fact that Europe had peace for the longest period ever after the end of World War II. He neglects to mention the proxy wars fought between the East and the West in Africa (e.g. Congo, Angola), Latin America (e.g. Guatemala, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua), the Middle East (e.g. Lebanon, Iran), and Asia (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Korea).
Intersecting both the man and the memoir, I felt there was a huge lack of humility on his part. He doesn’t need to beat himself up or constantly downplay his achievements, which are plenty. But I felt as if physics in the 20th century would never have happened if Mr. Wheeler hadn’t been around. I guffawed (a word I’ve always wanted to use!) when he called out several scientists (including Oppenheimer) for being less than humble.
Having ranted for several paragraphs, I want to conclude by saying that this is a book worth reading for many people. To see how science was done is crucial for today and tomorrow. Scientists worked together, and PhD’s taught their students, instead of passing such duties on to their graduate assistants. Also, it stirred so much up in me, part excitement, part questioning, part disagreement, that it must be a good book since it got a conversation going in my head and with the person who gave me the book.