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.'"

Comments

What about Hawking?

[Garridan]

'For me, he was the last Titan, the only physics superhero still standing.'

What -- has Steven Hawking retired, or died?

A sad day.

[molex333]

You will be missed. There is not much that can be said when the scietific community looses such a distinguished and important person.

RIP

[apodyopsis]

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.

Not just a nice man

[techpawn]

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.

Dyson, Gell-Man

[weston]

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.

Re:Dyson, Gell-Man

[MightyMartian]

Well, if any still-living physicist sits in the top echelon of science, it is Hawking, who did do some revolutionary research in his time (the man is in his late 60s now, and at that age you don't usually expect to much original research).

But as to the underlying notion that somehow there was this era of supermen of physics, I suppose it's true to a point, but even the greats were standing on the shoulders of giants. The chief difference, I suspect, is that during the late 19th and into the first half of the 20th century there was a considerable amount of public appetite for science. Men like Einstein were idiosyncratic demi-gods in many peoples' eyes. There was a drama to it all, and scientists were seen as almost epic figures, unlocking the secrets of the universe and ushering in a new age of reason and enlightenment. World War 2 and the rise of atomic weapons ended that, and in particular, the Cold War encouraged much more practical science, while theoretical physics to some degree slipped into the shadows, with about the only time it ever really gained any attention being Hawking and Penrose's work and String Theory.

There is no lack of exciting research today, and we certainly have some great scientists, but the general attitude of the public to science seems to be a combination of apathy and mistrust. As well, physics is currently in a bit of a consolidation period, not so much revolution as evolution as the stunning discoveries of the last hundred years percolate and the much harder, and much more thankless work of trying to sort out just what all these giants had discovered means. The biggest problem is the unification of GR and Quantum Mechanics, and I think once we get that, we'll probably see a new era of giants as the full implications of that union once again revolutionizes our view of the universe.

Re:Pop Physicist Versus Real Physicist

[Dachannien]

a vast majority of the five billion simpletons living on the earth Actually, there are six billion simpletons living here. It's just that roughly one billion of them have firmly convinced themselves that they're not simpletons.

Google Wheeling & INFORMATION THEORY

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

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].

Re:Pop Physicist Versus Real Physicist

[Anonymous Coward]

And thirdly, there is still one physics superstar left: Steven Weinberg.

Cool

[SleptThroughClass]

Wheeler's entropy is now increasing. His temporary reversal of entropy has ended.

Re:Pop Physicist Versus Real Physicist

[Dasher42]

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?

You know you're on Slashdot when someone speaks so condescendingly of most of humanity for their lack of PhD-level expertise in a specific field and gets modded interesting. I challenge you to take a few good cultural anthropology classes. Just a few. The human experience does not begin or end in a physics lab.

Here a great man has passed in a great field, and we mar that with misanthropy.

OTOH

[DeadDecoy]

Erds only has a Wheeler number of 3. Who's the amateur now?

Re:Pop Physicist Versus Real Physicist

[JustinOpinion]

Secondly while Hawking has made several important discoveries, he was cited by my college physics professor to be a 'pop' physicist. I think that's rather harsh. I mean, if a genius who publishes significant theoretical work and has made substantial original contributions to physics (e.g. Hawking radiation) can't be considered a "real" physicist, then who is?

By such a strict classification system, there are only two dozen physicists on Earth... and the thousands of professors in the physics departments of the world are then only 'pop' physicists?

Hawking may be more well-known for his popularization than for his fundamental contributions, but his work in both areas is significant. He's a real scientist who understands physics at a deep level, and calling him a 'pop' physicist is unfair.

(Note: There certainly are some professors who make little to no impact on research, and who are only good at popularizing science. Those are the 'pop' scientists, in my opinion.)

Re:You might want to look at his publishing record

[xtracto]

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.

I, on the contrary think that it is _those_ scientists who can communicate science to the general population the ones who really are worth their salt. Because they are the ones who *really* understand the subject they are describing and who also are able to transfer such knowledge to other people.

Pop Physicist?

[jotaeleemeese]

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).

Re:Pop Physicist Versus Real Physicist

[John Miles]

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?

Regardless what the objective answer to that turns out to be, elitism isn't healthy. Those 5E9 simpletons -- or at least the ones in the US, Europe, and Russia -- are the ones who pay for all the expensive research toys like the LHC. I think the most important role of a Hawking or a Sagan is to help explain what the "simpletons" are getting for their money.

Put another way: no matter how "smart" you are, you can be replaced. Some bored kid, somewhere, will gladly do your job, and probably for fun. Everybody knows about the rivalry between Newton and Leibniz, right? If one of them had been run over by a bus^H^H^H horse, it would've been a shame, but we'd still be where we are today, give or take a few years. Even work as apparently-revolutionary as Einstein's early stuff was more a synthesis of current ideas than anything truly new.

But if you're a good "explainer," you really are indispensible. By educating, challenging, and inspiring the tax base, those guys and gals make everybody else's work possible. And by making tedious fields of study seem romantic and boundless, they recruit future generations of researchers, some of whom will make a real difference.

Right now, every technical field from physics to biology to space science is suffering these days for want of more Sagans and Hawkings. It was not only petty and lame for your professor to criticize Hawking for being a "pop physicist," but it was out-and-out counterproductive.

Re:Pop Physicist Versus Real Physicist

[glitch23]

Hawking is a genius but mostly in theoretical physics.

So? I didn't relize theoretical physics was less important than other fields such as particle physics.

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.

So? Many people collaborate on projects, especially books. In the making of *any* books, tens if not hundreds of people can be involved. Of course that gets widdled down to 1 or 2 people as far as authors are concerned but it still takes more than 1 person to write a book. Given that Hawking can't write (but can do calculations in his head) I don't think it takes away from the quality of his work that he has a collaborator on his books. Penrose also has written the Forewords/Preface to books as well.

It's a sad fact of our society, your work is commonly overlooked until you're dead.

The problem is that scientists who propose something that goes against the status quo are ignored for some reason and it sometimes takes 2 or 3 people over a period of decades to propose the same thing either independently or by finding documented research by Person A for someone else to take notice of Person A's original work. I guess it is a much slower version of the peer review process. Given that it takes a while and people only survive for ~80 years, there is a good chance that by the time a scientist's work that was originally ignored for being fringe or just ahead of its time is rediscovered the scientist is dead. This has happened many times over the centuries.

With that said, I don't think the issue with Wheeler was that his work was overlooked, as in ignored. I've heard his name in many of the cosmology books I've read but his work was so far above my head that I did overlook it for that reason but I'm a layman. Other physicists I'm sure rely heavily on his work as background information and as a basis for further research into various topics. He was like a grandfather for some people.