Tokyo Wheeler or the Epistemic Preconditions of the Renaissance of Relativity

Abstract

During the period identified as the Rebirth of General Relativity, John Wheeler was instrumental in retrieving the physics of gravity that had become hidden behind the mathematical formalism. For Wheeler himself the change in point of view was not from mathematics to physics; his thinking about gravity arose from, and was largely guided by, physical problems about elementary particles. We recount his development from the view of fields as derivable from particles, to fields as the more fundamental entities in nature. During the more than 10 years of his search for "particles first" Wheeler did not write an orderly sequence of accounts as his views developed, but the story could be pieced together from letters. and particularly from his extensive but seldom sequential notebook entries.