 | President and Mrs. Bush Saddened by Death of John Archibald Wheeler Laura and I are saddened by the death of John Archibald Wheeler, one of America's greatest physicists. During his distinguished career, Dr. Wheeler collaborated with scientists such as Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr on projects that changed the course of history. |
Dr. Wheeler was also a great teacher who understood that educating young minds would be one of his most significant contributions. As a professor at Princeton University and the University of Texas-Austin, Dr. Wheeler inspired generations of students such as the late Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman to transform their curiosity into scientific discoveries.
Today our thoughts and prayers are with the Wheeler family. # # #
John Archibald Wheeler From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
John Archibald Wheeler (July 9, 1911–April 13, 2008) was an eminent American theoretical physicist. One of the later collaborators of Albert Einstein, he tried to achieve Einstein's vision of a unified field theory. He is also known for having coined the terms 'black hole' and 'it from bit.'
John Archibald Wheeler was born in Jacksonville, Florida. He graduated from the Baltimore City College high school in 1926 and received his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University in 1933. His thesis, under the supervision of Karl Herzfeld, was on the theory of the dispersion and adsorption of helium.
He was a professor of physics at Princeton University from 1938-1976, then a professor of physics at the University of Texas at Austin. The list of Professor Wheeler's graduate students includes Richard Feynman, Kip Thorne, and Hugh Everett. Unlike some scholars, he gave a high priority to teaching. He taught with enthusiasm, inspiration, and imagination. He was exemplary at finding ways to convey complex ideas in understandable terms. Even after he had achieved fame, he continued to teach freshman physics, saying that the young minds were the most important.
Wheeler made important contributions to theoretical physics. In 1937 he introduced the S-matrix, which became an indispensable tool in particle physics. He was a pioneer in the theory of nuclear fission, along with Niels Bohr and Enrico Fermi. In 1939 he collaborated with Bohr on the liquid drop model of nuclear fission.
Together with other leading physicists, during World War II Wheeler interrupted his academic career to participate in the development of the U.S. atomic bomb under the Manhattan Project at the Hanford site, where reactors were constructed to produce plutonium for the bomb which would be dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki. Even before the Hanford site started up B-Pile (the first of three reactors), he had foreseen that the accumulation of "fission product poisons" would interrupt the ongoing nuclear chain reaction by absorbing neutrons and correctly deduced (by calculating the half-life decay rates) that an isotope of xenon (Xe135) was responsible. He went on to work on the development of the American hydrogen bomb under Project Matterhorn B.
After concluding his Manhattan Project work, Wheeler returned to Princeton to resume his academic career. In 1957, while working on extensions to general relativity, he introduced the word wormhole to describe tunnels in space-time.
In the 1950s, he formulated geometrodynamics, a program of physical and ontological reduction of every physical phenomenon, such as gravitation and electromagnetism, to the geometrical properties of a curved space-time. Aiming at a systematical identification of matter with space, geometrodynamics was often characterized as a continuation of the philosophy of nature as conceived by Descartes and Spinoza. Wheeler's geometrodynamics, however, failed to explain some important physical phenomena, such as the existence of fermions or that of gravitational singularities. Wheeler therefore abandoned this theory in the early 1970s.
His work in general relativity included the theory of gravitational collapse; he coined the term black hole in 1967 during a talk at the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS). He was also a pioneer in the field of quantum gravity with his development (with Bryce DeWitt) of the Wheeler-DeWitt equation or, as he calls it, the "wave function of the Universe."
Recognizing Wheeler's colorful way with words, characterized by such confections as "mass without mass", the festschrift honoring his 60th birthday was fittingly entitled Magic Without Magic: John Archibald Wheeler: A collection of essays in honor of his sixtieth birthday, Ed: John R. Klauder, (W. H. Freeman, 1972, ISBN 0-7167-0337-8).
John Wheeler was the driving force behind the voluminous general relativity textbook Gravitation, co-authored with Charles Misner and Kip Thorne. Its timely appearance during the golden age of general relativity and comprehensiveness made it the most influential relativity textbook for a generation.
In 1979 Wheeler spoke to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), asking them to expel parapsychology, which had been admitted ten years earlier at the request of Margaret Mead. He called parapsychology a pseudoscience (Gardner 1981:185ff). His move was turned down and the Parapsychological Association remained a member of the AAAS.
Wheeler was awarded the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1997. He maintained an office in Jadwin Hall at Princeton up until 2006.
Wheeler is almost metaphysical in speculating that the laws of physics may be evolving in a manner analogous to evolution by natural selection in biology. "How does something arise from nothing?", he asks about the existence of space and time (Princeton Physics News, 2006). He also coined the term the Participatory Anthropic Principle (PAP), a version of a Strong Anthropic Principle. From a transcript of a radio interview on "The anthropic universe"
“We are participators in bringing into being not only the near and here but the far away and long ago. We are in this sense, participators in bringing about something of the universe in the distant past and if we have one explanation for what's happening in the distant past why should we need more?". Martin Redfern: "Many don't agree with John Wheeler, but if he's right then we and presumably other conscious observers throughout the universe, are the creators - or at least the minds that make the universe manifest ...”— John Wheeler
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