John Archibald Wheeler
John Archibald Wheeler
Born	July 9 1911 (1911--) (age 96) Jacksonville, Florida, U.S.
Residence	United States
Nationality	United States
Field	Physicist
Institutions	University of North Carolina Princeton University University of Texas at Austin
Alma mater	Johns Hopkins University
Academic advisor	Karl Herzfeld
Notable students	Demetrios Christodoulou Richard Feynman Jacob Bekenstein Robert Geroch Bei-Lok Hu John R. Klauder Charles Misner Milton Plesset Kip Thorne Arthur Wightman Hugh Everett Bill Unruh
Known for	Nuclear fission Geometrodynamics General relativity Unified field theory
Notable prizes	Enrico Fermi Award (1968) Oersted Medal (1983) Albert Einstein Medal (1988) Matteucci Medal (1993) Wolf Prize (1997)

John Archibald Wheeler (born July 9, 1911) is 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 as the coiner of the popular name of the well known space phenomenon, the black hole.

Biographical summary

John Archibald Wheeler was born in Jacksonville, Florida. He graduated from the Baltimore City College high school in 1926^[1] 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 Hanford, WA, where reactors were constructed to produce plutonium for the bomb which was to be dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki. He went on to work on the development of the American hydrogen bomb under Project Matterhorn B.

After concluding his Project Matterhorn 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. 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).

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 [#wp-endnote_Gardner1981_ (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).

Books by Wheeler

• Wheeler, John Archibald (1962). Geometrodynamics. New York: Academic Press. DOI:10.1103. 
• Misner, Charles W.; Kip S. Thorne, John Archibald Wheeler (September 1973). Gravitation. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman. ISBN 0-7167-0344-0. 
• Some Men and Moments in the History of Nuclear Physics: The Interplay of Colleagues and Motivations (1979). University of Minnesota Press
• A Journey Into Gravity and Spacetime (1990). Scientific American Library. W.H. Freeman & Company 1999 reprint: ISBN 0-7167-6034-7
• Spacetime Physics: Introduction to Special Relativity (1992). W. H. Freeman, ISBN 0-7167-2327-1
• At Home in the Universe (1994). American Institute of Physics 1995 reprint: ISBN 1-56396-500-3
• Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics (1998). New York: W.W. Norton & Co, hardcover: ISBN 0-393-04642-7, paperback: ISBN 0-393-31991-1 — autobiography and memoir.
• Exploring Black Holes: Introduction to General Relativity (2000). Addison Wesley, ISBN 0-201-38423-X
• Law Without Law — theorizes experiments utilizing photons from distant locations in the universe, imaged using galaxy clusters as lenses, but which are detected using apparatus for quantum entanglement, thereby influencing history billions of years in the past.

Bibliography

• Update on John Archibald Wheeler, Princeton Physics News, Volume 2, Issue 1, Winter, 2006 Princeton University

See also

• Genealogy of theoretical physicists
• List of theoretical physicists

References

•   Martin Gardner (1981). Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus. Prometheus Books. ISBN 0-87975-144-4. 

Notes

External links

• John Wheeler video at the Peoples Archive
• John Wheeler
• Science Show - 13-09-2003 Profile of John Wheeler
• Law Without Law
• Wheeler's Classic Delayed Choice Experiment
• Annotated bibliography for John Wheeler from the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues
• Princeton Physics News Volume 2, Issue 1 Winter 2006, (see p. 5)

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