Header image: A page from Wheeler's notebook showing his famous diagram of a black hole.
The Relativity Notebooks from the John Wheeler Papers are now digitized in their entirety and available to view in our digital library.
John Archibald Wheeler (1911-2008, APS 1951), a leading theoretical physicist of the 20th century and a pioneer in the study of black holes, kept meticulous research notebooks. Within the pages of these books, one can find correspondence, detailed notes, mathematical equations, and Wheeler’s musings on a variety of topics. He wrote from margin to margin, often returning to the notebooks to paste new thoughts on top of the old ones. Wheeler's method was to paste in material and add his own comments or responses in the margins or in the pages that followed. For an examples, you can find his fully-digitized Notebook #1, 1952-1953 here.
These notebooks are some of the most requested materials in the collection both for on-site researchers and for digitization. Over the last 5 years, the majority of these relativity notebooks have been digitized by request. It is clear how valuable a resource these notebooks are for researchers, so the decision was made to digitize all 19 of them to have a complete set.
The notebooks are also some of the most challenging material in the collection to digitize. Wheeler layered additional notes on top of writing or other, previously pasted-in notes, mixing relevant correspondence with research. In some instances a single page of a notebook could have 15-20 pieces of correspondence, notes, and articles tipped in. This creates challenges when digitizing. But we have developed digitization workflows that allow users to get a true sense of the object.
In many cases reference digitization is done by specific request but we are always looking for special digitization projects. Sabrina Bocanegra, Head of Digital Access, and I, made the determination that these notebooks were perfect for a special digitization project. We worked collaboratively to digitize these notebooks that can now be viewed in our digital library.
This is exciting work with growing possibilities. If you have any ideas for digitization projects or a set of material that would be beneficial to have completely digitized please let us know!