Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn (40 page)

Chasing down his former students hadn't exactly provided the enlightenment we were hoping for. No one seemed to really know what Wheeler had been thinking. The only option was to hear it straight from the source. I might have failed in my mission to score a book contract for my father and me, but I was determined to get our hands on those journals.

I was scouring the Web once again for any clues to their whereabouts when I stumbled upon a transcript of a lecture that Charles Misner, another one of Wheeler's former students at Princeton, had recently given at the University of Maryland. Halfway through the lecture, Misner
said, “John did have this habit for, I guess, all of his life of having bound notebooks.… They were always there. When he had a group of students in the office he would sit down and take notes as the discussion went on. He would also make notes to himself about the calculations he was doing, or the work he planned to do. What were the important questions in physics? And so forth … Those notebooks, incidentally, have been given to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.”

Philadelphia?

They were in my hometown?

I immediately pulled up the American Philosophical Society's manuscripts library catalog and searched for the Wheeler journals—but nothing turned up. I tried again … nothing. I tried WorldCat, searching the collections of more than ten thousand libraries. Finally, a listing appeared: the Wheeler collection, twenty-eight volumes of notebooks. With it, an error message:
Sorry, no libraries with the specified item were found.

Eventually I found a reference to the Wheeler collection on the American Institute of Physics's International Catalogue of Sources, which confirmed Misner's claim that the journals were indeed at the American Philosophical Society. It listed neither a call number nor a status. It simply said,
Contact repository.

So I did. I told them that my father and I were coauthoring a book about Wheeler and that even though the journals were on restricted access, we desperately needed them for our research. The coauthorship structure may have violated the quantum no-cloning theorem and the laws of publishing, but I figured the librarians probably wouldn't notice, and I was right. They agreed to let us look at the notebooks.

I called my father at his office to tell him the news: “I found the journals.”

The thing about the American Philosophical Society is that it's exactly the kind of place you'd expect to find the secret of the universe.

The APS began as the Junto, Ben Franklin's secret society. Franklin—inventor, printer, politician, Freemason—had specified that the original Junto consist of only twelve members, its proceedings kept tightly under wraps. The group met every Friday, when each member was required to “produce one or more queries on any point of morals, politics or natural philosophy,” which the twelve men would then discuss “in the sincere spirit of inquiry after truth.” Sixteen years later, Franklin transformed the Junto into the Philosophical Society. “That one society be formed of virtuosi, or ingenious men, residing in the several colonies, to be called the American Philosophical Society,” Franklin stipulated, the aim of which would be to explore “all philosophical experiments that let light into the nature of things.” Franklin was elected the group's first president. Early members included Thomas Paine, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson. Later members included Robert Frost, Albert Einstein, and John Wheeler.

The APS building was erected on Fifth Street, in the heart of Philadelphia's Old City. The building is a classic work of Georgian architecture
around the corner from Independence Hall, where Jefferson would later present the Declaration of Independence and near where the Liberty Bell sits today in all its fractured irony. Soon the APS built Library Hall, nestled in a tiny cobblestone street next door to the country's second bank, now a Revolutionary War–era portrait gallery. Today the library holds 11 million rare manuscripts and countless rare books, including first editions of Newton's
Principia
and Darwin's
Origin of Species.

“I can't believe we're about to read his journals,” my father said, sounding almost giddy, as he tugged open the library's large wooden door. It was a hot August morning in what appeared to be the eighteenth century, the sound of tourist-filled horse-drawn carriages clacking in the thick summer air.

I was awfully giddy myself. According to the manuscript librarian, only two other people had read through the journals. As per Franklin's requirement, we were prepared with our own query: what had Wheeler meant that day back in Princeton? I had no idea what to expect. I hoped it wouldn't be another dead end.

The foyer of the American Philosophical Society library in Philadelphia
A. Gefter

Inside we entered a small but impressive foyer, with a high ceiling and a striking black and white checkered marble floor. On the walls, framed by ornate molding above and colonial wainscoting below, were glass cases displaying Jefferson's handwritten copy of a late draft of the Declaration of Independence and a map of Lewis and Clark's expedition drawn in Clark's own hand.

We checked in at the front desk and were handed badges that gave us access to the library's reading room. Heading through the arched doorway, we found ourselves in a kind of holding room with lockers for us to store all the things we weren't allowed to bring near the manuscripts, including pencils and paper. Once we had stashed everything except our laptops and power cords, we entered the huge glass doors to the reading room.

The whole scene looked suspiciously perfect. Old books lined the walls; a staircase led to a balcony for reaching the higher shelves. Brass chandeliers hung over wide mahogany tables. Busts of Franklin and Jefferson watched over a handful of scholars quietly turning fragile pages. It was beautiful. I couldn't help wondering if the old books were empty props, the scholars hired extras. “It looks fake,” I whispered to my dad.

He nodded. “Like a movie set.”

Secret societies? Rare manuscripts? Restricted access? Masons? A treasure hunt through inscrutable symbolism to decode the mysterious phrases that had now haunted us for a decade? At stake nothing less than the secret of existence?

“I feel like I'm in a fucking Dan Brown book,” I whispered.

Standing next to John Wheeler's journals in the American Philosophical Society library
W. Gefter

We approached the librarian seated behind a desk and explained that we had come to look through the Wheeler journals. “Which ones?”
he asked, handing us a thick manila folder containing a catalog of the Wheeler materials.

I obligingly thumbed through the pages, then answered, “All of them, please.”

He looked skeptical. “There are
a lot
of notebooks.”

I smiled. “We know.”

“Okay,” he said, a hint of warning in his voice. “I'll bring out a few for you to start.”

We took a seat at the center table and waited until the librarian emerged wheeling a cart full of thick bound notebooks, maroon and brown and bursting at the seams.

“Be careful with them,” he said, eyeing us nervously. We must have looked like a pair of ADD-riddled kids on Christmas morning, ready to tear into our presents, waiting to pounce.

“We will,” I said, perhaps a little too eagerly, and he left us alone with Wheeler's words.

“Remember,” I whispered to my dad, “keep your eyes peeled for anything about a self-excited circuit or the boundary of the boundary.”

I grabbed a journal off the cart at random. It was labeled “Relativity Notebook No. XIX.” Carefully cracking open the cover, I discovered a fortune, the kind that comes out of a cookie, which Wheeler had glued onto the first page:
Persistence will be rewarded.
I took it as a sign of encouragement and began to read.

In the journal, I found Wheeler contemplating what he called the “paucity of laws,” the unbelievable fact that all the complexities of the universe seem to be governed by a few simple laws of nature, which in turn are likely unified into something simpler still. “Closer to center we get, the fewer laws we find and the simpler they are,” he wrote.

Several pages later I read, “The law of force, law of interaction should be such as automatically to guarantee conservation of the source, via the principle that the boundary of a boundary is zero.”

“Look!” I shouted in a whisper. “Already!”

Wheeler continued. “Seems to make these laws of Maxwell and Einstein almost trivial manifestations of something simpler going on
‘inside'—except that ‘inside' presupposes idea of space—and space should be a secondary notion.” A few pages later, in an entry titled “Down with Space,” he had scrawled, “Space prejudices dimensionality when there ought not even to be any dimensionality.”

“Feynman would say one is talking dreams here,” Wheeler wrote, “that one should instead be doing calculations. My fear: if one thinks only on those things which one can calculate, he fails to think about lots of important issues. In other words, it may be more important to look for the right questions than to look for the right answers. [‘Truth doesn't come flying in. It has to be dragged in by the heels.']”

I couldn't find any more clues to the boundary of the boundary in that journal, but soon my father was nudging me, excitedly pointing to a passage. I leaned over his shoulder to read. “We don't apply logic to something, logic is the whole thing.… No structure, no equations.
We
impose the structure. We form what forms us. [View of relativity as the boundary of a boundary consistent with this. Would be
wonderful
to show it ‘coming out of nothing' …]”

We form what forms us.
That sounded like the self-excited circuit. But how exactly was the boundary of the boundary related? And in what way did Wheeler envision it emerging from nothing?

A few turns of the page later, my dad was pointing again. “Yesterday, during unexpected stop-over at London airport because of Alitalia strike, rang Penrose, told him of view that there is no structure except pregeometry beneath it all, no dimensionality, no general relativity.… Once again concept of ‘mere elasticity.' I noted [the] boundary of a boundary, and how this idea comes close to being as dimensionless as any idea can well be. He felt there is too much beauty in the structure that he works with for this to be just an illusion, an appearance, of four-dimensionality. I, on the other hand think of structure without structure, law without law, and physics without physics. The very nature of the laws we see derives, we conceive, from their being the grossest way we can ascribe structure to something that has no structure.”

General relativity is “mere elasticity”? I was starting to wonder if the journals were going to offer more questions than answers.
Wheeler would have said that was a good thing, but I suspected that an answer or two couldn't hurt.

As I continued to read, I was amazed by how meticulously organized the journals were—not by the library staff, but by Wheeler. Every journal began with a detailed table of contents referencing the heading and page number of every entry. In the margin of each entry, Wheeler noted the date, time, and location of the writing. Had he glued into the journal a loose piece of paper—the back of an envelope, perhaps, or notes scrawled on a conference itinerary—he noted not only the date and time of the note-taking itself but also the date and time of the gluing. If it was a photograph, Wheeler had created a transparent overlay on which he indicated in colored markers the identity of each person in the photo. Had he spoken to a fellow physicist on the phone, he jotted down the precise duration of the call as well as the caller's phone number. Had he gone out to dinner with colleagues, Wheeler sketched the seating chart. Had he spilled some coffee on the page, he labeled the stain: “Coffee.”