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Physicist John A. Wheeler is Dead at 96
reverseengineer writes "Eminent physicist John Archibald Wheeler has died from pneumonia at the age of 96. The coiner of the terms 'black hole' and 'wormhole,' Wheeler popularized the study of general relativity, and advised a distinguished list of graduate students including Kip Thorne and Richard Feynman. Other work included a collaboration with Niels Bohr to develop the 'liquid drop' model of nuclear fission. 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.'"
'For me, he was the last Titan, the only physics superhero still standing.'
What -- has Steven Hawking retired, or died?
You will be missed. There is not much that can be said when the scietific community looses such a distinguished and important person.
Somewhere in a dark place you will find:
www.m1
neither
We will miss the man that proved the Universe falls inwards onto itself at points or at least just sucks really hard.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
...they just redefine the paradigm.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
I'm not interested in a flame war about Hawking. Or interested in a "debate" about his contributions to fat man and Nagasaki. He clearly was a genius in many fields, who helped advance science, was widely regarded by his peers and his comments on his part in the development on nuclear warfare makes it very very clear his interest lied only in stopping the war quickly to save millions of lives.
A great man has died, RIP.
My condolences top his next of kin.
John Wheeler was an old friend and colleague (many years ago at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton) of my Dad's - I just forwarded this article to Dad to read.
The Institute for Advanced Study had many 'legends' like Kurt GÃdel, Einstein, John von Neumann, etc.
He came in once or twice to talk to the physics classes - nice man.
Condolences to the family.
Has netcraft confirmed it?
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
He only has an Erds number of 3. Amateur.
great men of physics are now relative, since at one point physics theorys was a new and emegering field, and now we know a whole lot more. If the large hardon collider makes new physics discoveries it would be a culmulative effort from many individuals; all considered Titans in their own right, but won't get nearly the recognition einstein and wheeler did because the field is diluted with so many great minds now that typically not 1 indivudual is going to stick out.
It's like saying when bill gates or linus torvalds dies that "the last great computing titans have died" it is simply false.
on this note, rest in peace Mr. Wheeler
What makes a person great is that they are still humble in spite of their greatness.
In your remembrance of him, you make him out not just as a nice man, but, indeed as a great man.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
Secondly while Hawking has made several important discoveries, he was cited by my college physics professor to be a 'pop' physicist. Hawking is a genius but mostly in theoretical physics. My professor also degraded Brian Greene to a much further point by saying he was nothing more than someone relaying physics to the general public. I also got into an argument about Sagan but I had an even harder time defending Sagan than Hawking.
While I've read books about the nature of space-time by Hawking, I noticed they were often co-written with Roger Penrose. In fact, if I were to ask you the most famous work of Hawking, what would you say? Probably A Brief History of Time.
What might follow is arguments of who is more important, the man who discovers this science or the man who makes it easily accessible and digestible by a vast majority of the five billion simpletons living on the earth?
Perhaps it can be said that Hawking is more than a pop-physicist but I'm aware of criticisms that he's mostly a public figure with a very romantic story behind him--condemned to a chair he took to books and became a brilliant scientist! I read his works and love him but I'm not a physicist so maybe that's why?
At any rate, whenever anyone dies a lot more respect is delivered unto them. Although I don't remember people saying much about Paul Erdos, I was shocked when people recognized Stanislaw Lem's death on such a large scale. It's a sad fact of our society, your work is commonly overlooked until you're dead.
My work here is dung.
While Hawking has acheived fame for his popular science books, he has contributed immensely to the current state of physics thinking. The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time , co-authored with G.F.R Ellis (Cambridge University Press, 1973) is vastly influential.
I don't get this tendency for people to think that if someone produces popular science books, they must be an intellectual lightweight who can't make real contributions to the field.
Freeman Dyson and Murray Gell-Mann aren't exactly chopped liver either, and they could more or less be put in the same pantheon of Titans including Wheeler and Feynman (even though I think there's arguments to be made that Wheeler and Feynman were just a little extra special).
Hawking... I don't know. I can't deny he's been a good interface between the field and its popular discussion, or that he's been a good cosmologist, but it's hard for me to see him in the same way these figures who basically invented large swaths of modern physics.
Tweet, tweet.
Good grief, people, this is Slashdot: The guy was working on INFORMATION THEORETIC approaches to quantum mechanics [and coming up with all sorts of bizarre contradictions therein] when he was in his 70's & 80's [i.e. at an age when most people are going senile].
There aren't that many people who leave the world a poorer place by their passing. Fortunately, Dr. Wheeler, you proved to me that the past is not fixed. I'm going to change it.
Hold on. This may take me a bit.
He was a very good writer and that is what I knew about him until now. He wrote a series of paper explaining physics topics in lay man terms. I read several of them in the middle 90's using a dial up connection.
I will have to do a big search to find the current home for those papers. (if anyone knows, please share).
Uncanny resemblance to Einstein.
Wheeler's entropy is now increasing. His temporary reversal of entropy has ended.
Is he really dead or has the probability of him being alive just dropped to nanomeasures.
Would the person who modded the parent "insightful" please reply to kill the mod? Then, will you please email Rob to have him permanently turn off your moderator access? Then, please unplug your computer, put it back in the box and mail it back to the supplier. You are too dumb to read the internet.
Thank you.
is there an edit button?!!?!?
:)
hadron
Erds only has a Wheeler number of 3. Who's the amateur now?
Wheeler might be better known as part of the Misner/Thorne/Wheeler team that produced the Bible of General Relativity, but he's also the co-author of Spacetime Physics, one of the best SR books I've ever read. It's part of the school of physics textbooks that puts equations in service of language where they belong. If you have a basic physics background and want to learn more about relativity without wading through tons of Lorentz transfomations, give it a try.
Visit the
Now Wheeler will finally have the chance to find out what happened to that suitcase he lost on the train.
You know, the one full of thermonuclear weapons secrets.
Or maybe his heirs will find it in the attic.
I first heard about John Wheeler surfing the wikipedia about what I'll loosely call 'digital physics', and he was mentioned in contexts that made him sound like a kindred spirit.
Without being a physicist myself, just cherry-picking the theories I like, the way one might choose a religion, I like to think the universe doesn't have infinities, irrational numbers, and everything is discrete (maybe I'd allow aleph-null infinites, but no axiom of choice; I favor the constructivists). So, based on that unchallengeable authority, the wikipedia, Wheeler was a real, top level physicist, who seemed to be in pretty much the same corner.
So this is slashdot and I'm an extreme layman putting out my two-bits, fishing for more enlightened comments from people more in the field.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
There is a nice rememberance of Wheeler from one of his former students at the cosmic variance blog.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
You guys! When they say the last "great" is gone, it's from a different era!
Obviously people like Hawking, Weinberg, Thorn, etc. etc. etc. are great physicists, but they're not from the amazing era where people were making brilliant discoveries in relativity and quantum mechanics!
They're referring to that short and amazing time where x-rays were discovered, chemistry was explained, the heavens were starting to come together, and Physics was living in the shadow of The Bomb. There was so much that was being fought, the emergence of America, the philosophy of Quantum Mechanics, and the progress and destruction capable of science.
Wheeler was one of the last people who can remember those days. Hm... we need a funny epitaph: Finally disproved the theory of quantum immortality.
What is your college Professor? An amateur physicist?
Honestly, to say that about a man holding the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics position in Cambridge is a little bit rich.
Hawking (working with Penrose, what is wrong with that? He can defend himslef if he thinks he is not receiving the credit he deserves) has hinted to some of the most insightful findings about the nature of the universe (he is the person closest so far to demonstrate that god does not exist. If that is pop physics, well, I am Mickey Mouse then).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I've taken cultural anthropology classes--even while in college! I still read many books about Native American/First Nation, Inuit, Inca, Pima, Hopi, Aztec and League of Five Nations peoples. I love their culture! I find more reward from reading their religious ceremonies and beliefs than I ever did find in the bible! Here a great man has passed in a great field, and we mar that with misanthropy. "Misanthropy?" Ha! By acknowledging that there are people smarter than other people, you assume I meant misanthropy? At least I started my post with condolences to Wheeler's colleagues, his family and thanking him for everything he did for us. How do you feel about "the death of a great man?" I wouldn't know, you spent your time attacking me for calling most of the populace of the world simple.
I'm not a physicist, I was merely hoping to relay what my physics professor had told me about being a real physicist. I never even sad I believe it, I admire all these men mentioned and feel a simpleton myself compared to them.
What in the hell is wrong with being simple anyway?
My work here is dung.
... but only in this particular universe.
I've become familiar with the man's work by way of certain academic brushings up I've had with many-worlds theories. I have great respect for the sort of man it takes to ask, and strive to answer such wildly difficult, even incomprehensible, questions.
The great ones are gone and going, and I fear we shall not see their like again.
the J.A.W.s of life....
and is probably jawing away with BEELIONS and BEELIONS of stars of the YOONEEwerse...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
The state vector has collapsed, but that doesn't mean he's dead. He's alive and well in the universe next door.
"The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist." - Erwin Schrodinger
And physics is bereft of a brilliant thinker.
Godspeed John Archibald Wheeler, your books were my favorite source of headaches.
John Wheeler actually lived in my grandparents house before they moved in. He even came out to visit the old house about 15 years ago. After the visit, I picked up one of his books.
When Prof. Wheeler was at the University of Texas (and probably at Princeton as well) he used to give a penny to any student who found an error in what he had written on the chalkboard in class.
I wish I had kept mine.
John Archibald Wheeler and the Smoky Dragon, by Jonathan Vos Post
"For me, he was the last Titan, the only physics superhero still standing"
Wow, that's a nasty way to remind everyone that Stephen Hawking is disabled.
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
Although he is widely credited with coming up with the term, Wheeler made it popular. When asked he would relate the story of somebody at a conference (in the audience) saying it. As far as I know, the name of this person is unknown.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/04/14/america/Obit-Wheeler.php seems to be the first new article on googles front page to get that right.
I think it's a turning point in every physicist's life when you realize you will never understand general relativity.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
Enough worshipping and idolazing! John Archibald Wheeler was certainly among the better American physicists of the 20th century. But let us not start another cult here. There is already a quite serious Einstein cult, and even minor Hawking-cult and Witten-cult. I wonder why there is no Faraday-cult or Prandtl-cult. Maybe these people had much more practical sense to be worhsipped by a bunch of irrational idolaters. Feynman spoke highly of Wheeler, he had a deep respect for the man. However if you look closely you will see that Wheeler introduced one of the most bizarre ideas in Physics - the concept of black hole (a space-time singularity). Nature does not usually allow true singularities to develop, there is always another process that kicks in to smooth things up. The black hole concept is an artificial entity which can be called upon whenever Astrophysics ends up in trouble trying to explain observational idea. Since then people invoke the concept of black hole in more and more places where it does not belong. Black holes grow to giant sizes, sitting at the center of each galaxy, they collide and multiply like rabbits in modern astrophysical theories. And yet, black holes are entities that could never be directly observed (yeah Hawking radiation you'll say) and thus this is an unfalsifiable concept, much like 12 devils sitting on a tip of a needle. So people can use it as often as they like since you cannot prove that black holes cannot exist based on the current knowledge. Physics has long lost its critical ability, the field suffers from excessive conformity and supression of dissent. It is going nowhere anytime soon. Rest in piece, Dr. Wheeler.
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Somewhere in a dark place you will find:
www.m1