John Archibald Wheeler

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John Archibald Wheeler (born July 9, 1911) is an American theoretical physicist. One of the later collaborators of Albert Einstein, he tried to achieve Einstein's vision of a unified field theory.

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Biographical summary

John Archibald Wheeler was born in Jacksonville, Florida and received his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University in 1933.

Wheeler was one of the pioneers of the theory of nuclear fission (with Niels Bohr and Enrico Fermi), and participated in the development of the U.S. atomic bomb under the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos during World War II. Later he went on to participate in the development of the American hydrogen bomb under Project Matterhorn B.

In the 1960s, he formulated the so-called 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 has often been said to be a systematic prolongation 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 himself therefore abandoned this theory in the early 1970s. Wheeler is truly an almost metaphysical thinker as he ponders the concept that the very laws of physics may be evolving analogous to the fashion of natural selection and evolution in biology. One of his quotes is: "How does something arise from nothing?", referring to the concepts of space and time (Princeton Physics News, 2006).

Wheeler has made some very important contributions to theoretical physics. His career has included work on the theory of gravitational collapse, and he coined the term "black hole" in 1967. Later he was also a pioneer in the field of quantum gravity studies with his development (with Bryce DeWitt) of the Wheeler-DeWitt equation or "wave function of the Universe."

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 James Hartle. He gave a high priority to teaching, presenting himself even to freshman undergraduates and was extremely effective in the classroom as a teacher and as an inspiration.

Professor Wheeler had a colorful style of presentation, characterized by expressions like mass without mass. It is therefore fitting that the festschrift for his sixtieth birthday was 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 0716703378).

He often chose to teach freshman physics, even after he had achieved great fame, saying that the young minds were most important. He always taught with great inspiration, imagination and was truly exemplary in conveying complex ideas. John Archibald Wheeler was awarded the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1997. As of 2006 he still maintains an office in Jadwin Hall at Princeton University.

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Quotes

  • How does something arise from nothing?
  • We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance. (Quoted in Lightfoot, D. The Development of Language: Acquisition, Change and Evolution. Blackwell)
  • Without an observer, there are no laws of physics.
  • If you haven't found something strange during the day it hasn't been much of a day.
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Books by Wheeler

  • A Journey Into Gravity and Spacetime ISBN 0716760347
  • At Home in the Universe ISBN 1563965003
  • Exploring Black Holes: Introduction to General Relativity ISBN 020138423X
  • Geometrodynamics
  • Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1998. ISBN 0393046427 — an autobiography and memoir.
  • Gravitation ISBN 0716703440
  • 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.
  • Spacetime Physics: Introduction to Special Relativity ISBN 0716723271
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Bibliography

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

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