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

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

[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.

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.