Wheeler, John Archibald 1911–2008

(John A. Wheeler)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born July 9, 1911, in Jacksonville, FL; died of pneumonia, April 13, 2008, in Hightstown, NJ. Physicist, educator, and author. Wheeler was a member of the distinguished community of scientists whose work on nuclear physics led to the development of the hydrogen bomb, and whose peacetime research revolutionized the scientific understanding of the physical world. From his base at Princeton University, where he taught for nearly forty years, Wheeler discussed relativity with Albert Einstein and debated the nature of reality with Danish physicist Niels Bohr. Would the universe exist, he asked, if mankind did not exist to observe it? Wheeler worked with Bohr and with physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer on projects related to nuclear fission, which led to the atomic bomb that would end World War II. He worked with Edward Teller on the development of the hydrogen bomb, then afterward, despite his intellectual commitment to scientific research as an element of national defense strategy, he turned his attention to more theoretical concerns.

When he wasn't conducting groundbreaking research on his own, Wheeler was explaining his theories and those of his colleagues in vivid metaphors that rendered the elusive content of quantum physics understandable and interesting to a curious general audience. Wheeler is credited, for example, with developing the concepts (and coining the colorful nomenclature) of the black hole (the remains of a collapsed star so dense that not even light can escape from it), the wormhole (a theoretical tool for traveling through time and space), the geon (a ball of light contained by the pull of its own gravity), quantum foam (bits of matter so tiny that the laws of physics do not apply to them), and superspace (what is left after the opposite of the Big Bang occurs and the known universe explodes to form a new universe). He was fascinated by the ideas that thrive at the edges of physics and astronomy, the concepts that made so much sense to him but defied scientific verification—for the time being.

Wheeler was considered by some people to be one of the most brilliant scientists who never won a Nobel Prize, but he did receive some of the most prestigious awards in his field. These include the Einstein Prize in Gravitational Physics from the American Physical Society; the Niels Bohr International Gold Medal of the Danish Engineering Society; the Oersted Medal of the American Physical Society; the J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize; and, from the U.S. Government, the Enrico Fermi Presidential Award and the National Medal of Science, among many others. Wheeler left Princeton in 1976 as the Joseph Henry Professor of Physics. He spent the next ten years at the University of Texas at Austin before returning to the Princeton area, visiting the university on a regular basis for as long as his health permitted. Wheeler wrote about twenty books, some quite scholarly, but others in a format, seemingly intentional, that was appealing to the general reader. His writings include A Journey into Gravity and Spacetime (1990) and At Home in the Universe (1994), and the coauthored works Gravitation (1973), Black Holes, Gravitational Waves, and Cosmology (1974), and Exploring Black Holes: Introduction to General Relativity (2000).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

BOOKS

Greenburger, Daniel M., and Anton Zeilinger, editors, Fundamental Problems in Quantum Theory: A Conference Held in Honor of Professor John A. Wheeler, New York Academy of Sciences (New York, NY), 1995.

Klauder, John R., Magic without Magic: John Archibald Wheeler; A Collection of Essays in Honor of His Sixtieth Birthday, W.H. Freeman (San Francisco, CA), 1972.

Wheeler, John Archibald, Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 1998.

Zurek, Wojciech Hubert, Alwyn van der Merwe, and Warner Allen Miller, editors, Between Quantum and Cosmos: Studies and Essays in Honor of John Archibald Wheeler, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1998.

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, April 15, 2008, sec. 2, p. 11.

Los Angeles Times, April 15, 2008, p. B8.

New York Times, April 14, 2008, p. A23; April 17, 2008, p. A2.

Times (London, England), April 15, 2008, p. 53.

Washington Post, April 15, 2008, p. B7.