RETARDED LEARNER
At sixteen Wheeler entered Johns Hopkins University with
the idea of becoming an engineer. ‘‘My three uncles,’’ Wheeler
explained, ‘‘were mining engineers. With my interests, how else
was I going to earn a living except at engineering? The idea that
you could do what you wanted to do, and get paid for it, never
occurred to me.’’ Wheeler’s going to Johns Hopkins was, in Pas-
teur’s notable phrase, an example of ‘‘chance favoring the pre-
pared mind’’—the ‘‘chance’’ being, in this case, the presence of
a first-rate scientific institution in his ‘‘backyard,’’ and the pre-
pared mind being Wheeler’s. As Wheeler put it, ‘‘We were a
hard-up family, and the only place I could have afforded to go to
college was in Baltimore.’’ Wheeler’s engineering career lasted
one year, during which he took things like surveying, mechanical
drawing, and strength of materials. He then spent the summer re-
winding electrical motors in the Pittsburgh Verde Grande silver
mine in Zacatecas, Mexico, of which his uncle was the manager.
He found this a most unpleasant experience. Also, by this time he
had discovered the physics library, which shared the same facili-
ties with the engineering library at Johns Hopkins. While he was
doing his homework on the bending of metal beams and the like,
he would take a glance or two at the latest issues of the Zeitschrift
für Physik. This was 1927, and most of the articles on the then
new quantum theory were being published in the Zeitschrift.
Johns Hopkins had a six-year program that led directly to a
Ph.D. This meant that there was no clear-cut distinction be-
tween the undergraduates in the program and the graduate stu-
dents. (Indeed, Wheeler has no undergraduate degree. However,
he does have a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins, along with twelve
honorary doctorates.) There were some thirty students in the
physics program and classes were taught mostly in seminar fash-
ion. Students were asked to work for a certain number of weeks
with each professor so that they could get a variety of hands-on
laboratory experiences. It was an ideal arrangement for someone
with Wheeler’s vivid intellectual curiosity. He recalls, sometime
after 1929, encountering on campus the physicist Joseph Sweet-
man Ames, who had become the president of the university. ‘‘I
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