Scientists and mathematicians #1…
[A new feature just for my readers, wee bits of popular science nostalgia.]
John Archibald Wheeler (7/9/1911—4/13/2008) might have received only popular recognition for his students if he hadn’t coined the term “black hole” (Hawking popularly comes to mind first as the scientist most associated with black holes, of course). His most famous student was Feynman, but Misner and Thorne were two others (the doorstop-sized tome Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler, is one classic on the subject of general relativity). Wheeler was a physicist’s physicist, though, like Feynman, dabbling in anything that interested him.
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (8/8/1902—10/20/1984) was more like physic’s Harper Lee; he did a few things too (the idea of physical “constants” varying on a cosmic scale is intriguing), but he’s most famous for the equation that bears his name and postulating the positron as the electron’s anti-particle to make sense of it (it took physicists awhile to find that pesky particle, though). He had an early tome on quantum mechanics where he introduced bras and kets—today we know them as vectors in an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space and complex-valued linear functions on them (Hilbert spaces existed in Dirac’s time, but, like Feynman and many other theoretical physicists, Dirac eschewed rigorous mathematical formalism).
At a conference in the early 1970s held at New Orlean’s Loyola University (next to Tulane), Dirac and Wheeler were guests of honor and sat in the front row competing to see who could doze off first when the geekiness became as stifling as the bad AC. Dirac was particularly energetic during his talk, though. Loyola is a Jesuit school, so one smartass grad student decided to embarrass Dirac by asking him if his belief in absolute measurements didn’t imply a belief in God. Dirac, either agnostic, atheist, or just pissed (those might not be mutually exclusive, from Dirac’s reaction), dashed offstage and returned with a meter stick. “This is a meter,” he said, “and it will be a meter whether God exists or not” (that’s a paraphrase). Since Napoleon’s scientists invented the meter, he had a pretty good case.
By shifting several decades, black holes had a history similar to the positron—theory predicted them long before they were discovered. Many other predictions of general relativity were confirmed experimentally before that happened (I’m discounting extensions to women’s large handbags). Physicists play with positrons and a whole slew of anti-particles now; no one wants to play with or even come close to a black hole (unless you’re one of Pohl’s HeeChee). Today astrophysics brings the small (like the positron) and the large (like the black hole) together, at least theoretically. I’m sure Dirac and Wheeler are smiling about that—if they’re not taking a nap.
And so it goes….
