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Some recollections and comments are given about John A. Wheeler as a mentor, as a teaching researcher, and as a driving force in the revitalization of general relativity in the 1950s and 1960s. His relationship to Hugh Everett and the “Many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics is also discussed.

It’s a great pleasure to be here on this occasion, Claudio’s 60th birthday Fest. I’m going to talk about John Wheeler. Both Claudio and I were Wheeler’s Ph.D. students. That means we could call Wheeler our doktorfather which makes us brothers in science.

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Bibliography

  1. J. A. Wheeler with K. Ford, “Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam” (Norton, New York, 1998)

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  2. K. S. Thorne, “Black Holes and Time Warps”, (Norton, New York, 1994)

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  3. Anon., ed., “Family Gathering”, 2 vols. (privately distributed 1977: AIP, Princeton, TX)

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  4. Wheeler obituary: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/14/science/14wheeler.html

  5. R. Matzner and I. Ciufolini, editors, “The John Archibald Wheeler International School of Relativistic Astrophysics: Erice 2006” (World Scientific, Singapore, 2008)

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  6. M. Bartusiak, “Einstein's Unfinished Symphony” (J Henry Press, Washington, DC, 2000)

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  7. D. Kennefick, “Quest for Gravitational Waves” (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2007)

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  8. Misner – Beckedorff on black holes: http://hdl.handle.net/1903/4280

  9. Everett biography: http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/everett/http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/printPage.html?pageid=217829

  10. Everett conferences: http://users.ox.ac.uk/ everett http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/manyworlds/

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Correspondence to Charles W. Misner .

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© 2009 Springer-Verlag New York

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Misner, C.W. (2009). John Wheeler's Quest for Beauty and Simplicity. In: Zanelli , J., Henneaux, M. (eds) Quantum Mechanics of Fundamental Systems: The Quest for Beauty and Simplicity. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-87499-9_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-87499-9_14

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