John Wheeler; [Richard P. Feynman]

THE LEGENDARY JOHN WHEELER PENS A LETTER TO HIS MOST CELEBRATED STUDENT

Feynman’s revolutionary PhD thesis, “The Principle of Least Action in Quantum Mechanics”,

was completed at Princeton under the direction of John Archibald Wheeler and was submitted May 4, 1942, less than 3 years after his arrival in Princeton in the Fall of 1939. The focus of Feynman’s doctoral dissertation was, in part, an elucidation of the famous Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory, done in collaboration with Wheeler, the American physicist who, with the Niels Bohr, had unraveled in 1939 a key aspect of nuclear fission. Feynman's thesis work, reported only in brief during the war years¹ led, downstream, to three seminal & well-cited papers, all published in the Reviews of Modern Physics (RMP; papers referred to below as RMP 1, 2, & 3). ^{2 3 4}

Shortly after completing his thesis, Feynman married his childhood sweetheart Arline, who had been diagnosed with terminal lymphatic tuberculosis. A year later, the pair departed for Los Alamos where Feynman joined Hans Bethe’s Theory Group in Los Alamos working on the Manhattan Project, helping develop the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August, 1945. Feynman worked intensively during this time, and as Arline’s illness progressed, she moved to a sanitorium in Albuquerque for around-the-clock care. She died on June 16, 1945, just one month before the Trinity test (see lot 18 for the heartbreaking letters written by Feynman to Arline during this period.) Following the war, Feynman took a job at Cornell University, where after pulling himself out of a period of depression, set himself back doing the work which led to his being awarded the 1965 Nobel prize in Physics. With everything that Feynman had been through following the completion of his Ph.D., it is no surprise that the formal publication of his doctoral thesis was delayed by several years.

Wheeler’s letter- dated January 5, 1946- arrived the year following the publication of Feynman and Wheeler’s first joint publication (RMP1²) and revealed the thesis advisor’s frustration with his precocious PhD student, with the lengthy introductory note reading in part:

“In commemoration of the sixtieth birthday of Niels Bohr it had been hoped to present a

critique of classical field theory which has been in preparation since before the war by the writer and his former student, R. P. Feynman. The accompanying joint article,

representing the third part of the survey, is however the only section now finished.

The war has postponed completion of the other parts…”

Thus, RMP1 is identified by Wheeler to be part 3 of a series, and as history would have it, RMP2, authored by Feynman alone, & RMP3, written by Wheeler, but published jointly, are the "parts 4 & 5 in our series", respectively, mentioned by Wheeler in the letter.

The reference [at the start of the Letter...] to the National Academy of Sciences, as well as the decision of the Special Advisory Committee may refer to a [lingering?] wartime review of technical articles prior to publication.  In any case, RMP3 was not published [on account of its "radical revision" in Wheeler's hands? Feynman's long delayed response?] until 3 yrs later. Consideration of the stress energy tensor, with the metric g_mn typo tended to, appears in RMP3, pp. 431-2. 

The work by Gilbert Plass "presumably the sixth item in our series" appeared as-

“Blackbody Radiation in the Theory of Action at a Distance,” Phys. Rev. 70, 793 (1946)

and was presented later that year at a scientific meeting.

Feynman’s extension of his Princeton PhD thesis [& thus, RMP2] to a fully relativistic quantum mechanical context led, during the years at Cornell, to his unique diagrammatic formulation of quantum electrodynamics (1948-49; 4 seminal QED papers, the first- Phys. Rev. 74, 1430, submitted July 12, 1948...), for which he shared the 1965 Nobel Prize with Schwinger & Tomonoga. 

¹_{10-min presentation at the American Physical Society meeting, held Feb 21-22, 1941 at MIT-Harvard; see Phys. Rev. 59, 683 (1941) abstract]}

²_{RMP1- “Interaction with the Absorber as the Mechanism of Radiation,” JA & RPF, Rev. Mod. Phys. 17, 157 (1945).}

³_{RMP2- “Space-Time Approach to Non-Relativistic Quantum Mechanics,” RPF, Rev. Mod. Phys. 20, 367 (1948). Regarding the relationship of this 1948 paper to his 1942 Princeton PhD dissertation, RPF noted that RMP2. "...contained most of what was in the thesis. The thesis contained in addition a discussion of the relation between constants of the motion such as energy & momentum and invariance properties of an action functional. Further there is a much more thorough discussion of the possible generalization of quantum mechanics than appears in the Review article..."- Letter to J. G. Valatin, May 11, 1949.}

⁴_{RMP3- “Classical Electrodynamics in Terms of Direct Interparticle Action,” JA & RPF, Rev. Mod. Phys. 21, 425 (1949).}