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Alexander Blum
Max Planck Institute for the History of ScienceJohn Wheeler and Quantum Gravity

poster for Alexander Blum's virtual seminar, John Wheeler and Quantum Gravity, 7 december 2022, 4pm CET

John Wheeler was the inventor of quantum gravity – not as a formal program for uniting general relativity and quantum mechanics, but as the potential key to a theory of everything. In this talk, I will show how he first imbued quantum gravity with this new role in the 1950s and then how (and why) he ultimately abandoned this approach in favor of a non-spatiotemporal (“pregeometric”) approach to a final theory in the 1970s.