Friday, October 20, 2017

What is Paul Halpern reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Paul Halpern, author of The Quantum Labyrinth: How Richard Feynman and John Wheeler Revolutionized Time and Reality.

His entry begins:
I’m currently reading, and greatly enjoying, The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann, which had been recommended to me by many people.  It is fabulously written, full of many profound insights about the nature of time and the brevity of life.  I’m finding Mann’s description of a sanatorium (health spa for patients with tuberculosis and other illnesses) in the Swiss Alps fascinating because of the connection with my own book.  Feynman’s first wife Arline had tuberculosis and sadly died at a young age in a sanatorium.  With his incredibly rich descriptive prose, it is no wonder that Mann...[read on]
About The Quantum Labyrinth, from the publisher:
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.
Visit The Quantum Labyrinth website.

My Book, The Movie: The Quantum Labyrinth.

Writers Read: Paul Halpern.

--Marshal Zeringue