ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Storehouse of Imagination–or, John Wheeler's Notebooks

• In Event: Mathematics in Manuscripts 2

English Abstract

The eminent American physicist John A. Wheeler (1911-2008), besides being himself an impactful scientist, was a relentless mediator and propagator of ideas between different generations, different subfields, different scientific cultures. For the joy of the historian, Wheeler documented a rather large portion of all this in a series of notebooks that he kept for decades, annotating ideas, calculations, conversations, anecdotes, research plans, summaries of talks and conferences, excerpts from his correspondence, and so on. I will detail with examples how and why Wheeler began keeping a notebook, how he turned this practice into something peculiarly his own, and how his use of notebooks varied in different phases of his long and polyhedric career. Wheeler's heuristic transparency can provide us with unique insights into the back room of 20th-century physics, but, far from being simply a "goldmine", his notes can also represent a slippery ground for the historian and a challenge for our ways of conceiving science. I will thus conclude with a few considerations on the use of such archival material, comparing and contrasting it with the Nachlass of another decisive personality such as Niels Bohr.

Author

• Stefano Furlan, Utrecht University