Physicist John A(rchibald) Wheeler died 13 April 2008 of pneumonia. Born 9 July 1911 in Jacksonville, Florida, he will be remembered for coining the term “black hole.”
The Los Angeles Times says he was “science’s Zelig, seeming to be present at every important event or discovery. In a career that spanned eight decades, Wheeler consulted with Niels Bohr and Robert Oppenheimer to build the atomic bomb, helped Edward Teller with the hydrogen bomb, argued quantum mechanics with Albert Einstein and then, in middle age, turned his nimble mind to some of the most challenging problems of cosmology,” including the question of multiple universes and wormholes.
Wheeler received a doctorate in physics from Johns Hopkins University at the age of 21 (his dissertation was on the dispersion and absorption of helium). In 1933, he traveled to Copenhagen, Denmark, to study with Bohr (who won his Nobel Prize for the structure of the atom). In 1939, he was teaching at Princeton when Bohr visited with the news that Nazi scientists had recently found a way to split the uranium atom. “We at once plunged into the understanding of this act of fission,” Wheeler said. Two months later, he and Bohr were in Einstein’s office at Princeton when Bohr announced that it was possible to make an atomic bomb, though “it would take the entire efforts of a nation to do it.” After Pearl Harbor, the Manhattan Project put them to work building an atomic weapon. While Oppenheimer and the rest of the Project were working at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Wheeler consulted with DuPont engineers to build reactors in Hanford, Washington, to supply the plutonium for the bombs that would be dropped on Japan in 1945.
After working on the hydrogen bomb in the 1950s, Wheeler turned to cosmology. In a 1967 meeting of the Institute of Space Studies, he spoke of the idea of a “gravitationally completely collapsed object,” but found the phrase too awkward, and created the term “black hole” to describe an object (collapsed star) so dense that nothing, including light, can escape its gravity. He also created the terms “wormhole” and “quantum foam.” Working to reconcile relativity with quantum mechanics, he created the term “geon,” a ball of light held together by its own gravity. Geons are currently theoretical.
Wheeler’s students (he taught at Princeton and, after his mandatory retirement in 1976, moved to the University of Texas at Austin) included Richard Feynman and Hugh Everett. Everett’s PhD thesis, which Wheeler advised on, discussed quantum mechanics and theorized parallel universes (which Wheeler dubbed the “many worlds” theory).
In Isaac Asimov’s 1982 Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, he said Wheeler had “remained in the forefront of theoretical thinking,” matched only by Stephen Hawking.
Wheeler co-authored the 1200+ page Gravitation in 1973 with Charles Misner and Kip Thorne; the book is still in print. His autobiography, Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam: a Life in Physics, was published in 1998. He wrote another dozen books and hundreds of articles.
He won the Einstein Prize in 1965, the Enrico Fermi Award from the Atomic Energy Commission in 1968, the National Medal of Science in 1971, and the Niels Bohr International Gold Medal in 1982.
He is survived by two daughters (Alison Wheeler Lahnston and Letitia Wheeler Ufford), a son (James English Wheeler), eight grandchildren, 16 great-grandchildren, six step-grandchildren, and 11 step-great grandchildren. His wife, Janette Hegner, died last October at the age of 99.