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

by Paul Halpern

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.

Genres: Science, Physics, Nonfiction, History, Biography, Audiobook, Quantum Mechanics

336 pages, Hardcover

First published October 17, 2017

About the author

Acclaimed science writer and physicist Dr. Paul Halpern is the author of fourteen popular science books, exploring the subjects of space, time, higher dimensions, dark energy, dark matter, exoplanets, particle physics, and cosmology. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship, and an Athenaeum Literary Award. A regular contributor to NOVA's "The Nature of Reality" physics blog, he has appeared on numerous radio and television shows including "Future Quest" and "The Simpsons 20th Anniversary Special".

Halpern's latest book, "Einstein's Dice and Schrodinger's Cat," investigates how physicists Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrodinger battled together against the incompleteness and indeterminacy of quantum mechanics. Their dialogue inspired Schrodinger's famous thought-experiment about a cat in a box that is in a mixed state between life and death until it is observed. They struggled to find a unified field theory that would unite the forces of nature and supersede quantum weirdness. Sadly they would never find success and their efforts would lead to a fiasco.

More information about Paul Halpern's books and other writings can be found at:
phalpern.com

Reviews

[Claudia · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Everything you can imagine is real."

Picasso’s words seem to have been uttered specifically for these two unique personalities. John Wheeler and Richard Feynman gave new meaning to creativity and contribution in physics.

According to Thorne, Feynman turned to him and offered some sage advice about Wheeler: “This guy sounds crazy. What people of your generation don’t know is that he has always sounded crazy. But when I was his student I discovered that if you take one of his crazy ideas and you unwrap the layers of craziness from it one after another like lifting the layers off an onion, at the heart of the idea you will often find a powerful kernel of truth.”

This is my first Paul Halpern book and I must say it exceeded all my expectations. Such fluent and smooth writing, even poetic at times, the perfect blend between scientific facts, anecdotes and bits and pieces from physicists’ lives made it a superb reading.

From “everything is scattering” to “everything is electrons” and onward to “one electron is everything,” Wheeler’s active mind flitted like a butterfly from the nectar of one tantalizing idea to another. Taking a nurturing sip, it would drink its fill and move on to other delicious notions.

Quantum mechanics field is a baffling and difficult one, especially for a layman such as I. Nevertheless, I don’t think I’ve come across before on such clear explanations as in this book. Even if you don’t have a clue on it, I’m certain that everyone will be able to at least catch a glimpse on this mesmerizing and bizarre domain, because, as Feynman said, “nobody understands quantum mechanics”.

The references on these two titans' lives and many others - Bohr, Dyson, Einstein, Everett, Pauli, just to mention a few – are enthralling, to say the least. I simply devoured it; there isn’t a single boring page in the whole book. Some of the topics in it were familiar to me, other were completely new.

Most of the facts about Feynman I knew from his superb autobiography coauthored with his friend Ralph Leighton "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character , which I wholeheartedly recommend. On the others I knew some facts but mostly related to their works. However, to see the men behind the geniuses, their relationships, quirks and moods and what inspired them is truly remarkable.

The author also made some references to science fiction authors and works, perfectly integrated in here. The parallel between the alternate worlds in quantum theory and those in different SF works were right up my alley. Wheeler coined up the term ‘wormhole’ and was also the promoter for 'black hole' one.

There are a lot of topics developed, from electrons to blackholes and to many-worlds interpretations (in quantum physics), each more interesting than the other. Therefore, I highly recommend this book to all SF and physics aficionados and even to those who are not, because it will enrich your knowledge and understanding (if such a word is realistic) of our universe.

Now, we’ve reached the conclusion of the conclusion—the end of our winding journey through space and time. Our hunt for the ghosts of the past took many twists and turns […] The number of “crazy ideas” we’ve seen boggles the mind. All the while we’ve kept our sanity through a comforting, guiding principle: as sum over histories tells us, no matter how strange our path through spacetime, there exist many others that are even more bizarre.

>>> ARC received thanks to Basic Books via NetGalley <<<

[Peter Tillman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Halpern has written a first-rate history of physics from the early 1940s through the 1960s (with some previews), updated to the present day. His focus is on Feynman & Wheeler, but all the prominent physicists of the time make appearances. I can't say that he makes quantum physics more understandable -- that's a task beyond my scientific pay-grade, I'm afraid. But he captures the flavor of this extraordinary era really well, and relates a number of entertaining new-to-me Feynman anecdotes. Such as, did you know that he became an enthusiastic amateur actor for the Cal Tech players late in life? And there's the time he went to check into an over-fancy resort room at a conference, decided it was a waste of money, and went to sleep by the pool..... It got cold.

If you want real reviews, go to Manuel Antão's, https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
And Claudia's, https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
If you are at all interested in the history of physics, or the principal players, this is the book for you. Highly recommended. Strong 4 stars. Downchecked a bit for a longish discussion of Feynman diagrams, with no illustrations! --and some obscure (to me) text. Could have used more/better photos.

[Charlene · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a long overdue celebration of two of the world's most important physicists, John Wheeler and his student Richard Feynman. Every once in a while, there is a pairing so dynamic that a wealth of downstream reactions occur. The fortuitous pairing of Wheeler and Feynman was just such a pair. When these two minds got together and began a partnership that would last the rest of their lives, they became jointly obsessed with figuring out how the universe works. Using Einstein's theory of relativity as their guide, these two scientists went on to explain the world of quantum physics and, in so doing, changing the very way our species came to understand the universe in which we live. Their contributions to our knowledge base, as a whole, cannot be overstated. It is about time someone wrote this book, to collect in one place exactly what their contributions were. It would be impossible to read a book about quantum physics and not read about the work of either Wheeler or Feynman. However, to my knowledge, this is the first book that exclusively focused on what their knowledge union brought to the world.

It would take a book of my own to merely highlight the contributions that both Wheeler and Feynman provided the world of physics, but here are a few things you will read about when you get around to reading this extremely worthwhile book:

First and foremost, both physicists were visual thinkers and always made a habit of drawing out, in very simple terms, what they wanted to teach. I had known about Feynman's teaching methods that gave rise to the famous Feynman diagrams. Few people are unaware that Feynman's drawings changed the way we understood and exchange of particles on the smallest level we know of. I had not known, until reading this book, that it was Wheeler who often started his lectures and informal discussion with drawings. It was Wheeler who set Feynman on the path of making diagrams a staple in his teaching and thinking.

At the time Wheeler and Feynman were figuring out and explaining the strong and weak forces, they were thought to be the "meson force" because physicists thought protons were held together by the exchanged mesons. I love when I get a detailed glimpse into the evolution of thought. Halpern did a really nice job of explaining how the meson force evolved into the understanding that quarks were held together by the strong force, which involves gluons holding the quarks together. They discovered that the strong force only works at very short distances, the distance of the nucleus. Related, they came to understand the weak force was what allowed that same nucleus to come apart (e.g. the nuclear fission that occurs in the center of Earth). They did this, of course, by drawing out many different possible isotopes of uranium. When Wheeler drew out 235, the energy curve (barrier) was very low, which meant slower moving neutrons could bring about fission. Eureka!

One of my favorite sections involved Wheeler trying to better understand Compton scattering. Wheeler proclaimed, "Everything is scattering!" (This made me love him more than I can possibly put into words). Basically he loved that electrons eat light. If you shine light on an electron, the electron gains energy from ingesting the light. Subsequently, the photon of light loses energy. This means that when a high energy, fast moving wave of light (photon), it emerges (after being ingested by the electron) as a longer, less energetic wave of light (photon). Every single time researchers have tested this, the wavelength shift always matches the energy gained by the electron. This, to me, is one of the most beautiful things in all of nature. To read about Wheelers obsession with it was truly the highlight of this book for me. If I could travel back in time to different time periods, I would leap through the evolution of thought involving the photoelectric effect/ Compton scattering as the great minds of physicists throughout the ages came to understand this phenomenon. I would leap from the lunchroom table of Max Planck, to the outside tables frequented by Einstein when he would talk to Besso, to the lunch discussions of Compton and Wheeler and Wheeler and Feynman. To me, this was one of the most exciting shifts in understanding from Newtonian physics to quantum physics. Imagine being able to understand the quantum world, in a way no one had ever understood it before, simply by figuring out that you could measure the length of light waves, a real physical thing that gave you unexpected information about the laws of physics. HOW THRILLING!

Halpern recounted some experiments of physicists who made discoveries before and around the same time as Wheeler and Feynman (e.g. Ernest Rutherford's construction of the first linear accelerator, Einstein's relativity and Einstein Rosen bridge (which Wheeler termed a wormhole, and so much more)

Halpern excelled when it came to highlighting the more personal aspects of both Wheeler and Feynman's lives. He exquisitely captured their relationship with one another as well as their individual relationships with others. Pairing the personal narrative of both men and discussing their achievements made this an A+ book!

[Joseph Adelizzi, Jr. · Rating 4 out of 5]

For years my parents renovated their house; out with the old, in with the new. Again and again:

Avocado kitchen.

Blue and green kitchen.

Orange and gold kitchen.

Beige kitchen.

Gold sofa.

Flowered sofa.

White sofa with a regal trapunto.

Beige sofa.

Then they reached a point where the constant changes were just too much, too absurd, and everything stopped. It’s disconcerting but comforting to me: Disconcerting in that one could misconstrue their steady state as surrender rather than peace; comforting in that it is always nice to be a short drive away from the familiar coziness of my late-adolescent years. Kitchen cabinets that silently close themselves with just a little push?! Nope, not buyin’ it.

And that’s how I perceived Albert Einstein as portrayed by Paul Halpern in The Quantum Labyrinth. Einstein in the Age of Feynman and Wheeler was my parents in the Age of No More Renovations. I know Einstein was not the subject of Halpern’s book, and I’m doing Halpern a disservice by fixating on Einstein when his book is all about Richard Feynman and John Wheeler, but the mentions of Einstein are most likely what will stay with me for years to come.

That is not to say I did not enjoy learning of Feynman and Wheeler, their personalities, their foibles, and their theories. Halpern does an excellent job presenting each man and placing each within his time and his Physics. Feynman playing the bongos. Wheeler’s crazy theories and ability to turn a phrase to capture the essence of a theory. Feynman marrying his first wife even though she was very ill, and doing so against the wishes of his parents. Wheeler’s dedication to nuclear supremacy and the memory of his brother lost to the war. All memorable.

Nothing, though, quite as memorable as the aging Einstein. Quantum Physics where the observer determines reality?! Nope, not buyin’ it.

Beige Physics.

[Thom · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good biography with a lot of physics, or a great book on quantum physics with biographies of Feynman and Wheeler. Take your pick, this is pretty readable - though probably not for the beginner.

The author is a professor of physics, and interviewed one of the two principals in the book. His way of describing particle and quantum physics is smooth, especially in historical context. The early interactions of these two giants led to where we are today, and their continued contact influenced both. Chapters are nicely sectioned, though perhaps the section titles end up a little too cute ("Diet of Worms" for the section where wormholes were first theorized, for instance).

I was favorably reminded of Isaacson's The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, which emphasized the creative impact of collaboration. This team of physicists discovered and dreamed more than most, and creativity is part of the most impactful discoveries. A decent index, good notes and further reading all help with cross reference. There are a few photos but no diagrams - search engines are your friend here. Recommended.

[Nilesh Jasani · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Quantum Labyrinth covers a relatively unexplored part (in popular books) of quantum mechanics evolution while focusing on the two most colourful inventors of the time, John Wheeler and Richard Feynman. The book shines when the focus is on the life stories or personalities of the scientists but struggles where it tries to explain their work.

There are hundreds of books discussing the initial phase of QM starting from the birth of Einsteinian quanta to the explosions created by the theories of Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Pauli, Dirac, Fermi, and de Broglie. Of late, one finds many books detailing the onset of the particle physics starting from the era of the particle zoo all the way to the Higgs with digressions into various versions of grand unified theories.

The in-between critical phase of the QED almost always gets only a passing mention in these books. In popular books, the tales of how cosmic microwave background was detected or the travails of Bohm or the philosophical implications of Bell’s inequality get more mention than the pioneering ideas contained in quantum electrodynamics that paved the way to them. The Quantum Labyrinth exclusively focuses on how the QED came about while consciously ignoring what came before or after. This is what makes the book unique and vital.

John Wheeler and Richard Feynman are two amazing personalities. While the other popular books would make broad remarks about their extraordinary intelligence and some of the quirks, the focus on their personal lives is as little as the descriptions of their most famous work. This book fills the gap. The author is brilliant while describing their highly entangled lives and the life events that shaped their personalities. The author is equally lucid while describing their work philosophies - Wheeler’s perpetual dabbling with the outlandish versus Feynman’s zeal to limit everything to what can be observed or verified. These two who were great friends and collaborated to produce radical insights stood in stark contrasts on most aspects: if one was flamboyant, the other was formal. If one was more visual, the other one was a visionary but through equations. If one digressed by picking the locks, the other took the relativity route!

The book struggles while explaining the actual work. A part of the problem is because the author refuses to shed light on the importance of their work by utilizing what came later. The main problem is in their work: one can wax eloquent about the simplicity of Feynman’s wriggly lines, but most of these two great’s work are difficult to describe in the popular language. This is compounded by the brevity assigned to these topics in the book; if the author had provided significantly more detailed descriptions with repetitions, there could have been more to absorb for the lay readers.

The book is a great place to learn about the lives of two great scientists but sans their work.

[Jill · Rating 3 out of 5]

While this book contains a lot of interesting like ✨information -- it's overall sort of an annoying read. In the spirit of some of my old listicle-y GR reviews (I'm gonna get back into reading OKAY)...

Three Reasons Why This Book Was Annoying

1. The editing was so, so bad. Ostensibly, this is a journey through Wheeler & Feynman's contributions to the physics of the 40s-80s. In practice, it's a super weird mix of 1) incredibly dense, yet infuriatingly short, incomprehensible descriptions of physics concepts illustrated by incoherent metaphors, and 2) weird, contextless personal anecdotes Halpern got from interviews. Like almost all of these anecdotes are truly irrelevant and, frankly, cringy (I hate this word/concept, but it's apt, here) -- they have absolutely no bearing on the physics, and they often paint unflattering or boring pictures of the scientists (particularly since they're presented kind of as these special gem insights, but really I do not think it's special or amusing that, after his lost cat was found at Einstein's house, Wheeler asked his cat if it learned anything about general relativity). Aside from a fabulous description of Dyson & Feynman taking a Route 66 roadtrip, it was mostly filler. Janna Levin, babe, where are you??

At LEAST Halpern doesn't perform the cardinal sin of non-fiction and namedrop his own thoughts and perceptions and connections everywhere (he saves it for an easily-skippable afterword), but there's a sense that he really wanted to get these weird anecdotes that only he has into the book -- and had no idea how to do it effectively. This, coupled with a second deadly N-F sin (breezing over and inadequately explaining complex concepts), makes the book come off clumsy and amateur.

There's also a lack of throughthread -- no clear argument or point is really at play here. Like yeah, it's about Wheeler & Feynman, but full sections are devoted to other physicists who were also hanging out in the wings. It's not even exclusively about the development of quantum physics. So it's confusing, to say the least, to try to trace a decent path through this "labyrinth" -- which like, fine, you could argue that that's the formal point, but I don't think Halpern understands enough about literature to be making any points with formalism (see Annoying Thing #3), and also labyrinths are solvable. So idk. I think it was just chaotically written and inexpertly edited.

2. This is sort of a sub-point to the editing, but like. Okay. There are quite a few photos in the book of the various physicists. No real rhyme or reason to why (I suspect these, like Halpern's gem anecdotes, were something no one else had and so he wanted to get 'em in there). But like, when you think of Richard Feynman, what's one of the first things you think of? Feynman diagrams, right? Mmhmm. Yeah. Ever tried to read an explanation of one of those? There's a reason Feynman made them, you know, visual representations. That was sort of the point, right?

Okay well guess how many Feynman diagrams we see in the pages of this book?

Like Halpern, my dude: you had the capacity. You literally put photos in your manuscript. And yet instead of one single tiny example of a Feynman diagram, we thought it would make more sense to verbally describe a bunch of loops and arrows for pages with no visual reference? My dear. My darling. I apologize to anyone reading this and trying to imagine these who hadn't already seen them.

3. I'm a lit kid; I'll live and die a lit kid. And I always appreciate literary references in pop science books, because, yes -- there's amazing overlap and it's so cool to think about. But like. Incorrect literary references that eschew the context, in my opinion, are about as frustrating as incorrect physics references that eschew the context (cf Schrodinger's cat). And of all authors, our dear context-mired George Orwell gets pulled out of context so fucking often, I can't stand it (I apologize to the amount of pandemic grave-rolling you must have done with all the 1984 antimasker references, sir). However my LEAST favourite Orwell mis-reference, that happens All The Fucking Time, is the "some animals are more equal than others" one. Like. This does not mean that some solutions are better than others. It's not a fun shorthand for prioritizing correctness. No, it's uh, it's a comment on political tyranny, oppression, and the rewriting and destruction of any truth outside that of those in power. Can we all please collectively as a culture STOP using it to mean "there were two or more things that could've been true, but it turned out one was more correct!"

Okay rant over. But there are so many clumsy literature references in this book that I had to pick one. Love that they were there, but I repeat: it's as important to reference literature with context as it is to reference science in that way. The humanities gets a bad rap for appropriating science concepts, but my beloved science bros, when you're trying to get a good metaphor or lit ref going, please practice what you preach.

And disclaimer: read & interpret shit however the fuck you want, I'm not your mom -- just when you're using it as a reference point to make something else clearer, y'know, maybe that's not the time to fanon it up



OKAY THAT'S IT, THAT'S MY LIST. Overall I did genuinely enjoy reading this book somehow and I love that I know more about a time in physics I didn't know much about previously. But like maybe there is another book somewhere that does it slightly more artfully, I'll keep ya posted

[Mike Pluta · Rating 2 out of 5]

I consider myself to be a geek of all things Feynman. This book was a disappointment. There is nothing here that hasn't been written before, and written much better.

[Hind · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic biography of Wheeler and Feynman. How they’re similar, how why’re very different.

[Mack · Rating 5 out of 5]

Halpern's account of Feynman and Wheeler's lives and works is not only enjoyable, but it helped me to fill in many gaps in my understanding of how modern physics got where it is and isn't or might be.

[David Wineberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are two natural divisions in quantum mechanics. The first focused in Europe, from Planck through Einstein to Heisenberg. The second was in the United States, with European refugees working around the likes of Richard Feynman and John Wheeler in the runup to the second world war. The Quantum Labyrinth is about this second era, from the late thirties onward. It is as much biography as science. Paul Halpern has pulled together the lives of numerous protagonists, giving them humanity and human foibles amidst the admittedly difficult and bizarre world of quantum mechanics. Feynman himself famously declared that no one understands quantum mechanics. And he was in the eye of the storm.

John Wheeler and Richard Feynman form the spine of the story. They encounter and work with literally everyone who mattered in the discipline. That they met is remarkable. Feymnan transferred to Princeton specifically to become a teaching assistant to Eugene Wigner. Instead, he was assigned to Wheeler. Wheeler turned out to be just seven years older than Feynman, and had a very similar sense of himself and science. The two of them hit it off immediately, and spent endless hours laughing at everything and nothing together. Eventually Wheeler became Feynman’s Phd advisor, and they worked together basically the rest of their lives. Their discoveries fill book shelves.

Nothing in quantum mechanics was too wild for Wheeler. He dreamed in Technicolor. Feynman, no slouch in the imagination department either, took Wheeler’s ideas and provided mathematical proof and justification (where possible), not a year later, but in hours. Not to put too fine a point on it, Feynman obtained his doctorate in three years. Together they assaulted the boundaries and pushed them off in new directions.

The book is at its best when Halpern tells stories showing the physicists’ human side. When Feynman gave his first public lecture at Princeton, “a collection of monster minds” attended. Names like Von Neumann, Wigner, Pauli and Einstein. Before it began, Einstein interrupted Feynman at the blackboard and asked where the tea was. Feynman said he was relieved to be able to answer at least one of Einstein’s questions.

Wheeler invented the wormhole, named Feynman’s method sum over histories, and promoted the term black hole in popular science. When the universe was not enough, he tackled information – the world of bits instead of subatomic particles. It was a Wheeler brainstorm that led to the theory there was just one electron, racing around the universe showing itself.

What weakness there is in The Quantum Labyrinth is in Halpern’s discussions of quantum mechanics. It’s his profession, and he doesn’t make it easy for readers. What usually happens is Wheeler or Feynman has made some huge discovery, and Halpern asks us to step back to understand the mechanics of it., right down to the fundamentals. There is no math, but it is still dense.

It turns out physicists are real people, with quirks as well as quarks. Bohr mumbled incoherently. Dirac was painfully introverted. Feynman was always up for adventure. He played bongos into the wee hours (it was cited in his divorce), acted in plays at Caltech and was the most entertaining lecturer anyone had ever experienced: “a magician of the highest caliber.”

The story has not ended, of course. There continue to be more questions than answers, and it gets worse with every discovery and every new theory. The labyrinth is of their own making. That no one can find the way out is a clear indication that much of what is claimed is simply wrong. The value of The Quantum Labyrinth is the real, human side of this voyage of discovery.

David Wineberg

[Josh Friedlander · Rating 3 out of 5]

The fundamental weirdness of QM is pretty well known, and as Feynman said, all of it can be derived from the double-slit experiment: depending on whether there is an observer, light behaves either as a wave or as a particle. Putting aside its ramifications, we can successfully model this in a way that fits all experimental evidence. But how do we picture it? That more philosophical question still hasn't a satisfactory answer. The venerable Copenhagen Interpretation defended by Bohr is based around the principle of "complementarity" - that there is one identity, and it is determined by the observer. (Does the observer have to be human? What about a daemon? We don't know.) The other school of thought is Everett's Multiple World Hypothesis, as science fictional as it sounds.

The two men featured in this book, Wheeler and Feynman, took very different views to this type of question. Wheeler was a philosopher and dreamer with a dramatic turn of phrase (he coined "wormhole" and "sum over paths", and made "black hole" famous) who attracted a lot of cranks late in his life. Feynman was a pragmatic tinkerer who loved practical jokes, bongo drums and teaching and had little interest in philosophical questions. The book describes the friendship between the patrician Wheeler and the flamboyant, Queens-accented Feynman, which is, fundamentally, not so exciting? Both were brilliant and they got on straight away. But Halpern is really telling the story of the quantum revolution from the 1930s-60s, in the shadow of Pauli, Bohr, Hesienberg, Schroedinger, and the oddball Dirac. ("He's another Dirac, but normal!" was one comment about Feynman.)

As pop science it suffers from a common failing of the genre: adamant not to use any maths, Halpern is forced into describing things in increasingly vague and nonsensical ways, often resorting to folksy analogies that obscure more than they enlighten; as when discussing Hamiltonians he gives a simple metaphor explaining what a derivative is and moves on. Still, I enjoyed it. It made some things a bit clearer for me, and conveys some of Wheeler's sense of wonder and Feynman's infectious joy.

[Regina · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review is of the audiobook version of this title. The Quantum Labyrinth is a book mostly biographical about the lives of two great physicists, Richard Feynman and John Wheeler. It did intersperse some scientific descriptions in lay-person’s terminology so that it was very understandable. I especially appreciated the explanation of Feynman diagrams, which I have seen but needed more explanation to understand. I also greatly enjoyed the historical manner in which the author, Dr. Halpern, began the journey of quantum physics and the great scientists that built upon the theories and mathematics to get us to where we are today with many new emerging technologies related to these subjects. It makes me want to watch the movie Infinity again (a story about the life of Richard Feynman). This book ends with me wishing these great scientists could have lived longer and contributed even more had they been given time. My hope is that more great minds explore these topics and make new discoveries and create more understanding of this universe we occupy.

[Devero · Rating 5 out of 5]

Una grande storia.
Come le vite di Feynman e Wheeler si sono intrecciate, hanno proceduto in parallelo, hanno interagito con le altre grandi menti della loro epoca e insieme hanno forgiato la nostra visione dell'universo e delle leggi che lo governano, questa è la storia.
Una storia narrata in modo avvincente, ricca come poche biografie lo possono essere e chiara nell'esposizione di concetti scientifici non alla portata di tutti.

Mr. Halpern, thank you for this beautiful book.

[Keenan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A story of two of history's great physicists, the work they did together, and the forking paths their research took, Wheeler always being the wild idea man and Feynman the more down-to-earth principled one (at least when it comes to research). In tandem their work can be seen everywhere from black holes to QED to quantum information. What this book does best is present the ways that certain ideas came to them and from them and to show how quickly paradigms were shifted around with new discoveries like the Lamb shift and the CMB. A lot of the extra anecodtal stuff was sometimes interesting but felt out of place in the grander scope of the book.

[Matt Heavner · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great path (among many - one of the themes of the book) looking at 20th century physics through the partnerships of Feynman and Wheeler (and Dyson, Einstein, Thorne, ... touching many physcists). A good discussion of the physics but just as much about the people and their relationships. The narrative of the book was many-world interpretation, with lots of Broges' references. The description of Feynman's death reminded me of my dad's passing..

A good book.

[DRugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

An historical overview of John Wheeler’s and Richard Feynman’s contributions to particle physics. I found the subject matter fascinating, the writing not so much. Both of these scientists pushed and then focused on the cutting edge of reality.

[Aishwarya Ketkar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quantum physics will always remain strange to me. Over the last 2 years I spent time reading numerous books about both of them, but this book still had new ideas to share, also answers to some quantum puzzles. Ideally, if you have been reading about Feynman and Wheeler, this book fills in some of the missing pieces of information.

[Vlad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just wow! A fantastic great book! Informative, intriguing, illuminating. Excellent concept: short sections, biographical notes intertwined with scientific narrative. One of the best popular science books I've read. We need more Paul Halpern.

[Kara Babcock · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Quantum Labyrinth: How Richard Feynman and John Wheeler Revolutionized Time and Reality is a history book masquerading as a physics book, and I like that. I’m just as interested in the history of science as I am in science itself. As the title implies, Paul Halpern focuses on the lives of Feynman and Wheeler, protégés who individually and collectively had their fingers on the pulse of physics for much of the twentieth century. Halpern provides valuable insights into the lives of these two physicists and puts their contributions into the context of their lives and history. That being said, I do feel like this book is incredibly uneven. I received this eARC for free from NetGalley and Perseus Books in exchange for a review … apparently it has been out for a while now though….

Let’s talk some critiques first.

The Quantum Labyrinth doesn’t seem to know who its target audience is. Most physics books start from very basic principles and slowly develop more complicated principles of quantum mechanics on top of that. Halpern doesn’t; he goes hard. Halpern gets very technical in some respects, technical enough that a lay audience not as steeped in physics books as I am would be left wondering about a lot of things. At some points I was wondering if I had skipped an explanation. Just when I was convinced this book is aimed more at an undergrad physics student than anyone else, he’ll hit us with more elementary definitions of a force or a particle or a property—stuff a general audience might know—and I’ll wonder … why.

My related, and main criticism, is that this book is poorly organized and unfocused. The subtitle makes a grand claim, yet Halpern doesn’t pursue this idea of “revolutionizing time and reality” with any kind of direct arguments. He mentions how Feynman and Wheeler bandied about the idea of positrons being electrons travelling back in time (and perhaps all the same electron), yes; he mentions how Wheeler gradually comes around to studying relativity and in fact becomes a leading expert in that field, sure. But these are small details amidst a soup of other small details. Halpern chronicles the physics careers of these individuals, but not in a unified way. If Halpern were sitting in my English class working on an essay I’d remind him that everything needs to explicitly relate back to his thesis….

But there is good here too! Halpern really does include a lot of excellent detail about the lives of these two physicists. I learned so much about these two, who until now were names or the progenitors of concepts I’ve learned about. I learned more about Feynman as a character and a personality, the way he enjoyed the drums, got into stage-acting later in his life, etc. I love hearing these details about historical figures, humanizing them, putting them into the context of their times. Scientists are only, ultimately human, after all, and it’s really important we remember that.

Similarly, this book really made me think about how the theoretical part of science is related to social networking. So much of Feynman and Wheeler’s ideas are the fruit of discussions with each other or other physicists at conferences, impromptu meetings, or chats at one another’s homes. Whether it was a university position or working together on the Manhattan Project, these physicists always influenced each other’s ideas. Whether or not Bohr or another juggernaut liked your idea had a big influence on how many others took it up. A passing comment from Einstein or someone else might give you your next epiphany. Although science has changed a lot over the past century, I think it’s still true that social networks play a role in scientific discoveries and opportunities.

The Quantum Labyrinth is genuinely interesting. If you want to learn more about Feynman or Wheeler, you certainly will do that here. I just think that it won’t be as smooth or straightforward a read as I wanted it to be, reading it during a long work week.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

AN INFORMATIVE ACCOUNT OF THE WORK OF THESE TWO MEN

Paul Halpern is Professor of Physics at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia. He wrote in the Introduction to this 2017 book, “More than seventy-five years ago… a quiet revolution began here in our understanding of the nature of time. Discussions between two brilliant physicists, Richard Phillips ‘Dick’ Feynman and John Archibald ‘Johnnie’ Wheeler set off a chain of events that fundamentally recast the notion of time and history in quantum physics. Ultimately, their ideas transformed the concept of time from a single stream flowing inalterably in one direction into a labyrinth of alternatives extending backward as well as forward. By probing Princeton’s past, we wish to unravel how this radical change was born and understand its impact on the contemporary search for a complete explanation of physical reality.” (Pg. 1)

He recounts, “When admitted to Princeton, Feynman had originally been assigned as Wigner’s teaching assistant… At the last minute, Feynman was switched to assisting Wheeler instead. In retrospect, each considered the substitution one of the most auspicious moments in his career… Feynman and Wheeler’s collaboration… would lead to a rethinking of the fundamentals of quantum physics through the concept of ‘sum over histories,’ introduced by Feynman and named by Wheeler. That revolutionary approach sees actuality as a composite of all possibilities… The two physicists would prove the perfect team: Feynman cautious and thorough in his brilliant calculations, Wheeler bold and imaginative in his far-reaching notions. Honing and reworking bizarre hypotheses into workable solutions would become their joint specialty. A lifetime journey of intrepid explorations would launch in Wheeler’s Princeton office.” (Pg. 7-8)

Later, he notes, “Wheeler… loved bringing up with Feynman (and others) abstruse philosophical questions and thinking of ways to test them. Feynman disliked abstractions but relished the testing part. That’s one reason they were well matched.” (Pg. 25)

He explains, “Wheeler had thought deeply for years about the idea of replacing the field approach to electromagnetism with the more direct concept of action at a distance… Action at a distance, Wheeler thought, would make particle physics simpler by making electrons sole masters of their own fate. They would govern their own actions without an intermediary… Part of the motivation for resurrecting action at a distance in quantum electrodynamics stemmed from a growing understanding that many quantum phenomena coordinate their features remotely. Such remote interplay, called ‘entanglement,’ transpires when two particles with complementary values of a quantum number … such as spin are linked in the same system, no matter how distant they are physically.” (Pg. 59)

He states, “Wheeler found Feynman’s path integral method truly remarkable… To help promote what he saw as a revolutionary new concept, he decided to nickname it ‘sum over histories.’ … As his excitement for Feynman’s method grew, Wheeler thought he might even be able to persuade Einstein of its brilliance. He stopped by Einstein’s house again and had a deep discussion with him in his upstairs study. Wheeler asked if Feynman’s novel technique might persuade him to drop his opposition to quantum theory. However, Einstein, eyeing the theory’s chance component, couldn’t be swayed. ‘I can’t believe that God plays dice,’ said Einstein. ‘But maybe I’ve earned the right to make my mistakes.’” (Pg. 75-76)

He observes, “Wheeler and Feynman’s paper thus ends… imagining a world in which the future influences the past, and vice versa. By removing any distinction between forward and backward causality… it makes the future and past equally relevant to the future… In the Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory… particles feel the impact of events taking place in the future… From … Wheeler and Feynman’s concept… an entirely novel approach to electrodynamics would sprout… allowing the past, present, and future to speak to each other.” (Pg. 107)

He notes, “General relativity soon became Wheeler’s canvas. He aspired to craft anything in physics out of warped spaces and energetic fields. He dropped the concept of ‘everything is particles’ and adopted ‘everything is fields.’ It was a complete turnabout. Once he thought fields were an illusion; now he started to feel the same about material things. Once he believed in action at a distance; now all happened locally. Seeing how the brave new world of geometry and fields panned out would be an exciting adventure.” (Pg. 177)

Of the ‘Schrödinger’s Cat’ thought experiment, he says, “[Hugh] Everett’s interpretation made a completely different prediction. Once the system was set up such that the cat’s fate was entangled with that of the sample, reality would bifurcate. In one branch, the sample would decay… the cat would be poisoned… In the other, the cat would live… [The two versions] would know nothing of each other … They’d live in two slightly different alternative branches of reality---separated in an abstract realm of all possibilities. There would be no ‘bump’ when reality split, so neither would find anything unusual.” (Pg. 191)

He explains, “Everett’s hypothesis remained little known until 1970, when [Bryce Seligman] DeWitt penned a popular description of it for ‘Physics Today.’ He re-dubbed it the ‘many worlds interpretation’ (MWI) of quantum mechanics… DeWitt was the MWI’s most ardent advocate and popularizer… Nevertheless, he could fully see why others would doubt the idea that reality split ceaselessly into myriad copies… the MWI has become a respected alternative (in some circles at least) to the Copenhagen interpretation. Wheeler maintained mixed feelings about the MWI… he was… very uncomfortable with terms such a ‘many worlds,’ ‘parallel universes,’ and ‘splitting.’ Why bring in more than one universe? Feynman largely ignored the MWI interpretation… Such alternate realities seem too ‘science-fictiony’ for many hard-nosed physicists. Even for someone like Wheeler, who relished ‘crazy ideas,’ the notion of … .actual parallel universes was a bridge too far. For him, untestable assertions bordered on religious credos rather than representing authentic physics.” (Pg. 196-198)

He records, “surprisingly, John Wheeler would come to adopt an information-centered viewpoint… linked to quantum measurement theory. In the final stage of his research career, he would abandon ‘everything is fields’ for ‘everything is information.’ … Among the catalysts for Wheeler’s transformation were his interactions with a new generation of students far more familiar with computers and their workings… The notion of time entered strongly into Wheeler’s new approach… gaining an understanding of the flow of information is another way of trying to model time.” (Pg. 231)

He recounts, “Wheeler explained to his former students his vision that the laws of physics were forged in the Big Bang. Other universes might be out there with completely different laws. There must be some reason our universe has the particular laws it has. Perhaps if it didn’t, there would be no life and no conscious entities to experience it. Wheeler’s arguments were a variation of the ‘anthropic principle’… Such abstract reasoning was anathema to Feynman, as it couldn’t be proven or disproven… no one could assemble an array of universes and see what happened. So why talk about it?” (Pg. 234)

Ultimately, “Wheeler’s speculative notions, always a bit on the fringes, had become almost unfathomably abstract. They were so philosophical that no one could imagine how to test them… Yet Wheeler had no desire to be known as a New Age guru or pseudoscientist… He complained vehemently … when at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he found himself seated on a panel with parapsychologists. Neither did Feynman want such associations, but in 1984 he did give a talk … updating his views on nanotechnology, as the Esalen Institute… a New Age haven for hot-tubbers. He also experimented with flotation tanks, seeing what isolation and sensory deprivation would do to his thoughts.” (Pg. 253)

This book will be of great interest to anyone studying Wheeler and Feynman, as well as the development of contemporary physics.

[Yzabel Ginsberg · Rating 3 out of 5]

[I received a copy of this book through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

This is somewhat a strange book, hovering between a biography and physics book, through the lives of Richard Feynman and John Wheeler, and it seems to me it has both the good sides and shortcomings of both. Shortcomings, as in, it can’t go really in depth in the lives of the two scientists, and at the same time, the physics aspect is sometimes too complex, and sometimes too simple, which makes for an unbalanced read. But good sides, too, for linking the characters and their work, and giving an insight into said work, and overall making me want to read more about, well, everything in there. Probably in favour of Wheeler, since I already know quite a few things about Feynman (although I don’t seem to tire of him anyway).

I wouldn’t recommend it as a complete introduction to quantum and particle physics, though, since some of its contents are just too painful to follow without some basic knowledge of the topic.

I do recommend it for a global coverage of what Feynman and Wheeler worked on in their lifetime, to get pointers about specific topics worth researching more in depth later.

Style-wise, the book reads well enough in general, but more than once, some analogies were weird and fell flat for me.

[Poli Cvbs · Rating 5 out of 5]

¡Que maravilla de libro! En verdad no puedo enumerar la cantidad de argumentos interesantes que aprendí, leí y las veces que reí junto a este ejemplar.

Me llevo sobre todo la creatividad del pensamiento, su unión con la vida, el arte y la exploración en otras materias. Cómo ideas “descabelladas” como las de Wheeler al no descartarlas, sino, como decía Feynman, “pelarlas” como cebolla, terminan siendo una realidad.

Me encantó de principio a fin. Es un libro que personas lejanas a la física pueden leer y aún así aprender.

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came to Paul Halpern’s The Quantum Labyrinth indirectly. David Chalmers’ Reality+ reintroduced me to John Wheeler’s “it from bit” hypothesis, and I remembered Wheeler as the man who gave us terms like black hole, wormhole, and quantum foam. This was the only substantial book on Wheeler at my local library, and I took a look at it—but only late this year, after immersing myself in Feynman’s path-integral approach, did I finally open it. The timing was perfect.

Halpern writes accessibly, blending biography, physics, and even literary touches (the title nods to Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths” and Eco’s thoughts on labyrinths). The book is dense in places—the subject demands it—but never gratuitously so. It traces the intertwined lives and ideas of Wheeler and Feynman, from their fateful advisor switch at Princeton in 1939 to their divergent paths on the Manhattan Project, through the Cold War and beyond.

The contrasts between the two men drive the narrative. Feynman, tragic and flamboyant—haunted by his first wife’s early death, brilliant but grounded in calculation, playing bongos and acting in plays. Wheeler, disciplined, long-married, intellectually daring yet personally restrained, a Unitarian who lived modestly while dreaming the wildest dreams in physics. Their mentor-student relationship became the template for visionary guide and practical executor: Wheeler sketching vast speculative landscapes, Feynman demanding the amplitudes that made them computable.

What elevates the book is how Halpern uses their story to chart Wheeler’s intellectual evolution—from particles to fields to pure information as the foundation of reality. The early “one-electron” idea (the universe as a single electron zigzagging through time, forward as electron, backward as positron) seeds Feynman’s diagrams and returns in later guises: wormholes, delayed-choice experiments, the participatory universe. Wheeler never fully abandoned steady-state sympathies; his quantum foam hinted at continuous microscopic creation that might mimic the eternal uniformity he once favored. These threads culminate in his boldest claim: the universe as a self-excited circuit, brought into definite existence by acts of observation—yes/no questions registering bits of information that reach backward as well as forward.

For me, the deepest resonance was unexpected. Reading about Wheeler’s participatory anthropic ideas, Everett’s relative-state formulation (many-worlds stripped of collapse), and the retroactive role of observers shakes loose old assumptions about cosmology and theology. A universe that requires question-asking beings to solidify its own past cannot be a finished artifact imposed from outside by a wholly transcendent deity. Determinism collapses, or else the determining principle must be immanent—woven into the fabric itself. Wheeler’s Unitarianism, quietly noted in the book, suddenly made sense: no creeds, no literalism, no purely external scriptwriter intervening at will. Reality emerges collaboratively through law and observation.

This mirrored my own path this year—from initial openness to Christianity through Tipler and Teilhard’s physics-theology hybrids, to Spong’s demolition of dogma, finally towards a freer, rational spirituality closer to Unitarianism. Wheeler’s cautious boldness—launching ideas he would not always publish himself, inspiring students and successors like Tegmark, Davies, Chalmers, and Hoffman—gave intellectual permission to take foundational questions seriously again.

The book’s only shortcoming is minor: Wheeler’s own writings remain scattered and often out of print, forcing readers to approach him through interpreters to verify the claims of the author. Yet that indirection suits the man—Socratic, drawing truth from others, content to spark fires rather than claim the brightest flame.

The Quantum Labyrinth is not light reading, but for anyone drawn to the big questions—Why the quantum? Why anything at all?—it is rewarding. It left me with a universe that feels neither arbitrary nor pre-programmed, but participatory. Next up for me is Steven Johnson’s The Invention of Air on Joseph Priestley, another Unitarian polymath who saw divine order in natural law rather than miracles. The thread continues.
Highly recommended for those willing to wander the labyrinth.

[Jim Mann · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Wheeler and Richard Feynman were two of the great physicists of the 20th Century. Wheeler was soft-spoken, but had numerous ideas wild ideas. Feynman said "His ideas are strange; I don't believe them at all. But is surprising how often we realize later that he was right." Feynman was adventurous and flamboyant (had he lived longer, he'd have enjoyed being a recurring guest star on The Big Bang Theory), but in physics he wanted to discover the laws of nature and had no time for philosophy or ideas that couldn't be tested. But when he went to Princeton as a grad student, Wheeler became his advisor and mentor, and a great friendship and partnership came into being.

The Quantum Labyrinth isn't is not quite a joint biography, in that it skims the early life of its subjects and focuses primarily on the scientific careers of its two subjects. It also includes some good descriptions of the science itself, doing a good job explaining some important points of quantum physics (such as Feynman's sum over histories, a term which Wheeler actually coined) and of general relativity (a subject Wheeler helped revive at a time when many of his colleagues had decided it was old hat). And it does have some amusing stories about its subjects, including of Feynman's time at Los Alamos, when he enjoyed picking the locks of safes to show how he could get at classified material (and when they changed the locks to combination locks to stop him from doing this, he taught himself safe cracking and was soon back at it).

My only complaint is that, in a book that talks about the importance of Feynman diagrams, which became the standard way of showing particle interaction, the book shows no examples. (I know what they look like, but some readers may not, and it's an oversight of the book not to include one or two.) Likewise, at the author emphasizes how Wheeler liked to use diagrams of various sorts to explain what he was doing, but the only glimpse we get of one is in photo of Wheeler near a background, and there it's very hard to make out any details. But this is a relatively minor compliant about an otherwise very good book.

[Wendy (bardsblond) · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is part scientific history, part textbook, part dual biography. Overall, I did really enjoy this book. However, in writing a review, I think I would be negligent if I did not advise that readers should probably have at least a bare-bones understanding of basic physics principles in order to fully enjoy this book. I took college physics but do not work in a scientific field and I followed it fine but the author whizzes through the entire history of quantum mechanics and it’s not a long book, so many subjects are given a superficial treatment.

The book is ostensibly a biography of Richard Feynman and John Wheeler, two 20th century physicists who developed the absorber theory, which is an interpretation of electrodynamics. I had previously read QED by Richard Feynman so I had a bit of background on his work in quantum electrodynamics. But the book’s scope is actually much broader. It actually spans the entire history of quantum mechanics, going all the way back to Neils Bohr and Albert Einstein. In a way this was refreshing because the reader is treated to a quick overview of important historical moments in quantum theory, e.g., the Manhattan Project. I think the author used Feynman and Wheeler as the human lens for this larger narrative about the history of quantum mechanics.

I love Feynman and have read a few books by him and about him. As one of the most charismatic physicists of recent memory, he’s an excellent subject if an author’s intent is to draw in lay readers to a book about physicists.

I do wish the author had maybe delved a bit deeper into some of the more abstruse topics. Even as someone who knows a bit about physics and has read many books about physics, I sometimes struggle to conceptually grasp things like dark matter, spacetime, quarks, etc.

That being said, if you are a physics buff, you will definitely enjoy this book.

[Janne Peltola · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a tricky one.

On the one hand, I enjoyed the non-infantilising popularisation of a field that’s terribly hard to grasp without doing the math. There were lots of good analogies (and terrible ones), and even valiant attempts to explain operators or other mathematical arcana in lay language.

There’s also some very interesting philosophy of science and physics in there, mostly around the very … flexible concept of causation in quantum mechanics.

All in all, content-wise the book was a solid four. Not mind-bending, but excellent popular science regardless.

However, I was ready to toss the book out of the window at the 10th almost word-for-word anecdote from one of Feynman’s autobiographies (…or whatever you choose to call ”Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman” et al). Sure, Feynman was a colorful character who wrote some very funny anecdotes. I did not buy this book to rehash them.

Luckily, the book turns a leaf around the time Wheeler and Feynman figure out QED and becomes a solid look into how modern quantum mechanics and general relativity came together, viewed from the perspectives of Feynman and Wheeler.

Still, there was plenty of odd borderline-plagiarism and meandering anecdotes which made me lose focus. The philosophical quality of the book only came together in the summary! (In fact, the summary itself could make a very decent book by itself with a few additions.)

All these stylistic quibbles dock one star, so three it is.

[Jan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book about the great ideas of quantum physics and some of the most prominent people behind the science. When the young and brilliant physics student Richard Feynman was assigned deep thinker John Wheeler as his thesis adviser, that was the start of one of the most productive partnerships in modern physics. Wild ideas were grounded in brilliant math and physics, leading to the breakthroughs in quantum electrodynamics that gave Feynman his Nobel prize and celebrity status.

But science is more than big brains. Feynman, the joker, actor, player of drums and brilliant physicist also experienced great tragedy in his life, overcame adversity and continued to thrill his students and millions of fans until the end. Wheeler was more famous and revered among scientists than the general public, but this book brings out both his brilliance and his deep humanity. Wheeler's many students continue to form modern physics to this day.

This book strikes, at least for this reader, a great balance between the science and the story about the humans behind it. In this time where science is so often denied, ignored and doubted, it is a great reminder of the brilliance, the greatness, the imagination, the fun, and the humanity inside our greatest project as a species.

[Thomas Hansen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this was a very good book, it's incredibly well researched and is packed with details about their lives and their shenanigans. The only weird thing I noticed that nobody else mentioned was I feel like the writing style wasn't particularly great. Everything was written in past tense, and they often follow the same structure when talking about a discovery (thing they're working on, random fact about discovery, now they finished and have discovery). This would take place over a few paragraphs and repetitive structures like this and other writing styles made the book feel a bit monotonous. It's like the author knew this too, and was attempting to write a more literarily interesting book but was having a hard time with it. If you have a particular interest in one of these two characters than this might be the perfect book for you, but I don't think it was the most engaging book from a literary perspective I've ever read.

Again, really great, incredible content and a fascinating overview of their lives, but that's just what it is; it's just a collection of facts about their lives in past tense with familiar structures. There are more literarily interesting books out there if you just want to read about physics or important people

[Leonardo Etcheto · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating to see how their thinking evolved, and all the different ideas that were tried and tested and discarded. The cool thing was how nice they were as people as well, with family life being one of the goals for both Feynman and Wheeler. Wheeler had a more crooked route, with TB taking his first wife.
I really like these kinds of books that are an biography of both and idea and the people around it. It is incredible how much technological progress we have made since their time, yet how much they were able to discern with pure theory, the testing caught up to them later.
As an Ivy leaguer myself, the descriptions of the privileged world of academia brought back some nice memories of my school days. I confess I understood about 60% of the science and have already forgotten most of the details. The overall structure remains clear however, the search for how to explain both macro and quantum reactions of particles. The whole idea of mirror reactions in time and multiple states is fascinating. It is a cool universe. Very nicely written book, and very accesible - no formulas anywhere!