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Mach's influence on physics and Kurt Gödel

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Principle of mutability (Part 2)
John Wheeler Scientist
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In particle physics when we have particles collide, we may have strangeness, we may have parity, we may have charge, we may have a Baryon number, a Lepton number - we have a variety of numbers which serve to characterize particles and help keep track of what can happen in a collision, to find the commonality between the particles that come out and the particles that went in by saying the strangeness is conserved, or parity is conserved or not conserved and so on. But mutability is the argument that there is nothing that can't be 'un-conserved' if we look hard enough at processes that are extreme enough. Well somebody might very well say "What about electric charge?" Yes, we don't know any process that violates the Law of Conservation of Electric Charge, so if one believes in the principle of mutability, you'll keep looking for a process where electric charge is not conserved. I'm not immediately animated to go on a raging tearing search for such a process because I don't envisage it right now.

John Wheeler, one of the world's most influential physicists, is best known for coining the term 'black holes', for his seminal contributions to the theories of quantum gravity and nuclear fission, as well as for his mind-stretching theories and writings on time, space and gravity.

Listeners: Ken Ford

Ken Ford took his Ph.D. at Princeton in 1953 and worked with Wheeler on a number of research projects, including research for the Hydrogen bomb. He was Professor of Physics at the University of California and Director of the American Institute of Physicists. He collaborated with John Wheeler in the writing of Wheeler's autobiography, 'Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics' (1998).

Duration: 2 minutes, 12 seconds

Date story recorded: December 1996

Date story went live: 24 January 2008