John A. Wheeler, Physicist Who Coined the Term ‘Black Hole,’ Is Dead at 96

New York Times ^ | 4/14/08 | Dennis Overbye

[LibWhacker]

John A. Wheeler, a visionary physicist and teacher who helped invent the theory of nuclear fission, gave black holes their name and argued about the nature of reality with Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, died Sunday morning at his home in Hightstown, N.J. He was 96. Skip to next paragraph

The cause was pneumonia, said his daughter Alison Wheeler Lahnston.

Dr. Wheeler was a young, impressionable professor in 1939 when Bohr, the Danish physicist and his mentor, arrived in the United States aboard a ship from Denmark and confided to him that German scientists had succeeded in splitting uranium atoms. Within a few weeks, he and Bohr had sketched out a theory of how nuclear fission worked. Bohr had intended to spend the time arguing with Einstein about quantum theory, but “he spent more time talking to me than to Einstein,” Dr. Wheeler later recalled.

As a professor at Princeton and then at the University of Texas in Austin, Dr. Wheeler set the agenda for generations of theoretical physicists, using metaphor as effectively as calculus to capture the imaginations of his students and colleagues and to pose questions that would send them, minds blazing, to the barricades to confront nature.

Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said of Dr. Wheeler, “For me, he was the last Titan, the only physics superhero still standing.”

Under his leadership, Princeton became the leading American center of research into Einsteinian gravity, known as the general theory of relativity — a field that had been moribund because of its remoteness from laboratory experiment.

“He rejuvenated general relativity; he made it an experimental subject and took it away from the mathematicians,” said Freeman Dyson, a theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study across town in Princeton.

[SpaceBar]

The guy who did the math and actually figured it out, Karl Schwarzschild, died of injuries sustained during WW I. That’s how long the concept has been around. He solved Einstein’s field equations by hand for a spherically symmetric mass and ended up with a peculiar characteristic radius that bears his name, all while sitting in the trenches of Europe.

[Westlander]

Some people are amazing with their talent.

[wideminded]

Wheeler was the finest guy in the world in so many ways. One of the greatest privileges of my life was being able to interact with him on a regular basis for a whole year.

[processing please hold]

[Our man in washington]

He was a great man who I’ve had the honor of meeting on a few occasions.

One thing that impressed me about Wheeler was how careful a scientist he was. Many modern physicists are formulating these theories about multi-universes and string theory and all that without evidence. It almost seems like weirdness for the sake of weirdness.

In contrast, Wheeler developed the theory of black holes very carefully. He did not rush to embrace the idea. He tried every way he could to find problems in the theory before he concluded black holes probably existed.

[fieldmarshaldj]

RIP.